Contact Language Library

Variation Rolls the Dice: A worldwide collage in honour of Salikoko S. Mufwene aims to celebrate Mufwene’s ground-breaking contribution to linguistics in the past four decades. The title also encapsulates his approach to language as both systemic and socio-cultural practices, and the role of variation in determining particular evolutionary trajectories in specific linguistic ecologies. The book therefore focuses on variation within and across languages, within and across speakers, and how this fundamental aspect of human behavior can affect language structure in time and space. Mufwene has been instrumental in putting creole languages on the map of General Linguistics and connecting their analysis to issues of language acquisition, multilingualism, language contact, language evolution, and language typology. Thanks to the diversity of topics and the wide-ranging theoretical persuasions of the contributors, this volume aims at a large readership including both scholars and advanced students interested in cutting-edge research in the aforementioned domains.

South America was populated relatively recently, probably around 15,000 years ago. Yet, instead of finding a relatively small number of language families, we find some 118 genealogical units. So far, the historical processes that underlie the current picture are not yet fully understood. This book represents a preliminary attempt at understanding the socio-historical dynamics behind language diversification in the region, focusing on the Kawapanan languages, particularly on Shawi. The book provides an introduction to the ideas behind the flux approach of Dynamic linguistics and later concentrates on prehistorical language contact, specifically in the northern Peruvian Andean sphere. The number of studies presented shed light on a layered picture in which a number of Kawapanan lects were used in non-polyglosic multilingual settings. The book explores the potential contact relationships between Kawapanan languages, Quechuan, Aymaran, Chachapuya, Cholón-Hibito, Arawak, Carib and Puelche. The analysis draws on data collected in the field over a period of eight years (2012-2020) with both Shawi and Shiwilu speakers and includes the first comprehensive grammar sketch of Shawi.

Issues in multilingualism and its implications for communities and society at large, language acquisition and use, language diversification, and creative language use associated with new linguistic identities have become hot topics in both scientific and popular debates. A ubiquitous aspect of multilingualism is language contact. This book contains twelve articles that discuss specific aspects of Contact Linguistics. These articles cover a wide range of topics in the field, including creoles, areal linguistics, language mixing, and the sociolinguistic aspects of interactions with audiences. The book is dedicated to Pieter Muysken whose work on pidgin and creole languages, mixed languages, code-switching, bilingualism, and areal linguistics has been ground-breaking and inspirational for the authors in this book, as well as numerous other scholars working on the various facets of this rapidly expanding field.

Bilingual speakers are normally aware of what language they are speaking or hearing; there is, however, no widely accepted consensus on the degree of lexical and morphosyntactic similarity that defines the psycholinguistic threshold of distinct languages. This book focuses on the Afro-Colombian creole language Palenquero, spoken in bilingual contact with its historical lexifier, Spanish. Although sharing largely cognate lexicons, the languages are in general not mutually intelligible. For example, Palenquero exhibits no adjective-noun or verb-subject agreement, uses pre-verbal tense-mood-aspect particles, and exhibits unbounded clause-final negation. The present study represents a first attempt at mapping the psycholinguistic boundaries between Spanish and Palenquero from the speakers’ own perspective, including traditional native Palenquero speakers, adult heritage speakers, and young native Spanish speakers who are acquiring Palenquero as a second language. The latter group also provides insights into the possible cognitive cost of “de-activating” Spanish morphological agreement as well as the relative efficiency of pre-verbal vs. clause-final negation. In this study, corpus-based analyses are combined with an array of interactive experimental techniques, demonstrating that externally-imposed classifications do not always correspond to speakers’ own partitioning of language usage in their communities.

While universally present in languages, negation is well-known to manifest a surprising cross-linguistic diversity of forms. In creole languages, however, negation and negative dependencies have been regarded as largely uniform. Creole languages as Bickerton claims in Roots of Language, generally exhibit negative concord, a construction popularly dubbed ‘double negation’, where several expressions, each negative on its own, come together with a logic-defying single negation interpretation. While this construction – problematic for compositionality if the meaning of sentences emerge from the meaning of their parts – has fostered much research, the fertile data terrain that creole languages offer for its understanding is rarely taken into account. Aiming at bridging this gap, this book offers a wealth of theoretically informed empirical investigations of negative relations in a wide variety of creole languages. Uncovering a far more complex negative landscape than previously assumed, the book reveals the challenging richness that a thorough comparative study of creoles delivers.

Located near Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, Palenque is a former Afro-Hispanic maroon community that has recently attracted much national and international attention. The authors of this collection examine Palenque’s linguistic, geographic, and cultural origins from interdisciplinary and theoretically diverse perspectives. Extensive in situ fieldwork and long-term familiarity with the Palenquero community form the basis of the seven essays, all of which are enriched by data from archival and other scholarly works. In this book, linguists, literary scholars, historians, and specialists in cultural and visual studies thereby enter into mutually enriching dialogues about the origins and nature of Palenque’s unique Lengua (local creole) and culture. This rich tapestry of ideas is decidedly international, as its authors are members of academic institutions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Orality, Identity, and Resistance in Palenque (Colombia) is an updated translation of Palenque, Colombia: Oralidad, identidad y resistencia, 2012.