Language contact in Amazonia, and: Dynamics of language contact: English and immigrant languages (review)

The field of contact linguistics has grown tremendously within the last five decades, since Uriel Weinreich (1953) made the first attempt to classify different types of contact-induced change and the processes underlying them. But the study of language contact goes much further back in time, to late nineteenth-century studies of dialect contact and the formation of pidgins and creoles (Müller 1875, Paul 1886, Schmidt 1872, Schuchardt 1882). Other lines of research on language-contact phenomena included work on the dynamics of language maintenance and shift in immigrant and other multilingual communities, the linguistic and social characteristics of code-switching, and the nature of bilinguals’ linguistic competence and cognition. These studies laid the foundation for current investigations of a broad range of language-contact phenomena, spanning several subdisciplines, each of which has its own theoretical framework and has spawned a vast literature of its own. The field now embraces bilingualism, code-switching, pidgin and creole languages, bilingual mixed languages, language shift, and language attrition and death. The very diversity of the phenomena and of the frameworks that have been used to explain them has made it very difficult to integrate all approaches into a coherent and comprehensive model of contact-induced change. For the most part, the different fields of inquiry proceed more or less independently of one another. As Clyne notes, ‘language contact is a multidimensional, multidisciplinary field … involving interrelationships between the structural, linguistic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic’ (1). Yet little progress has been made toward integrating all of these approaches. This led van Coetsem to observe: ‘Contact linguistics still lacks an adequate conceptual basis on which a synthesis can be built that is theoretically well-founded’ (2000:39).

The components of such a unified framework include the accurate description and classification of contact-induced changes, the constraints and principles governing such changes, the role of the social context in determining the outcomes of language contact, the role of psycholinguistic factors, and so on. Moreover, there are practical problems involved in distinguishing changes due to contact from those due to internal causation, and the need to distinguish similarities that are due to genetic inheritance, chance, or parallel development.

The two books that are the subject of this review provide ample testimony both to the diversity of contact phenomena and to the problem of incorporating such diversity into a coherent descriptive framework. Each, in its own way, offers insight into the more general principles and factors that shape the outcomes of language contact. I first present a brief overview of each book and the kinds of contact phenomena they deal with and then evaluate their contributions to the field of contact linguistics by examining a number of themes and issues that are central to the field.

1. Dynamics of language contact

Michael Clyne’s book takes an in-depth look at the contact between various immigrant languages and English in Australia, exploring ways in which mutual influence among them has led to various kinds of contact phenomena, including changes in the immigrant languages. The focus of this study is the linguistic behavior of plurilingual (bi- and trilingual) speakers, the patterns of code-switching and code mixture they display, and the varying degrees of convergence with English among the immigrant languages. These languages belong to various families, and include German and Dutch, Italian and Spanish, Hungarian and Croatian, and Chinese and Vietnamese. Looking at these languages allows C to document how varying degrees of typological distance between English and the other languages make for differences in the outcomes of the contact. The comparison of data from bilingual as well as trilingual speakers also provides insight into the different effects that knowledge of two as opposed to one language other than English can have on plurilingual behavior. The study...