Language Encounters across Time and Space: Studies in Language Contact (review)

Since 1995 the Faculty of Arts at the University of Oslo has pursued a special project entitled Språkmøter (‘language encounters’). The 21 articles that comprise the present volume were originally papers read by Norwegian and other scholars at two symposia held in connection with the Språkmøter project at Bolkesjø, Norway, in November 1995 and at the Norwegian Institute in Rome in November 1996. With the exception of three articles written in German, the volume is written in English. It is divided into four parts—‘Some theoretical perspectives and models’ (four articles), ‘Perspectives from migration and language contact’ (eight articles), ‘High variety in contact with a low variety’ (four articles), and ‘Language encounters from an historical perspective’ (five articles). A review of one article from each of the four parts (in sequential order) will suffice here to highlight the scope of this volume.

In ‘The dynamics of code-copying in language encounters’ (37–62), Lars Johanson offers lucid explanations of various well-known language contact phenomena from the standpoint of the so-called code-copying framework, a descriptive linguistic apparatus that is reflected to varying degrees in most of the contributions to this volume. Rejecting the widely held notion of code-switching, Johanson explains that ‘the central concept of code-copying is that elements of one code are copied and the copies inserted into another code’ (39). In typical contact situations, either elements of a dominant language B₂ are copied into a dominated native language A₁ (constituting the matrix language or ‘model code’), or a community of A₁ speakers copies elements of its native language into a dominant language B₂ in the process of acquiring that language. In the latter situation, the target language (B₂) functions as the model code, and the copying of A₁ elements into B₂ is viewed as a ‘substratum influence’ (42).

In ‘Multilingualism in a Cameroonian village’ (195–203), Rolf Theil Endresen describes the complex sociolinguistic situation of the village of Galim in northern Cameroon. Endresen notes that relative to the size of its population, ‘Cameroon is more fragmented linguistically than any other country in the world except Papua New Guinea’ (197). Cameroon is also the only African country in which both French and English are official languages. French is the official language of that part of the country in which Galim is located although it is not the native language of any of the village’s inhabitants. The languages spoken in Galim include Fulani, Hausa, Nizaa, Vute, Kanuri, Mbum, and Chamba; together they represent five branches of three different language families (Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger-Congo). Endresen observes that in Galim, Fulani serves as a lingua franca, which is learned as a second language by native speakers of Hausa, Nizaa, Mbum, Chamba, and Kanuri (to the extent that ethnic Kanuri do not already speak Fulani as a native language).

In ‘Das Experiment des Ladin Dolomitan: Norm und Idiomvarianz’ (257–70), Ulrike Kindl describes the genesis and function of Ladin Dolomitan, a written language artificially created in 1994 to provide a single, supradialectal normative grammar, lexicon, and orthography for the roughly 20,000 speakers of Ladin dialects in the Dolomite valleys of northern Italy (southern Tyrol). The codification of Ladin Dolomitan was undertaken for the same basic purposes as that of Rumantsch Grischun (beginning in 1982) for the speakers of Rhaeto-Romanic dialects in Switzerland’s Graubünden (Grisons), viz., to serve both as a referential norm for native speakers and as a consolidated literary language that can be learned and used by nonnative speakers. Kindl points out, however, that the functional scope of Ladin Dolomitan remains highly restricted since most Ladinspeakers are accustomed to using Italian or German when communicating with people from outside the Ladin speech community of their respective valley.

In ‘Der Einfluss...