The pervasiveness of multilingualism throughout the African continent has led it to be viewed as Africa’s “lingua franca.” Nevertheless, sociolinguistic research on this topic has concentrated mostly on urbanized areas, even though the majority of Africans still live in rural regions, and rural multilingualism is clearly of much older provenance than its urban counterpart. In urban domains, individual language repertoires are dominated by the interplay between European ex-colonial languages, African lingua francas, and local languages, and language ideologies emphasize the ordering of languages in a hierarchy that is tied to social status. The situation in rural areas is clearly distinct, though it has yet to be thoroughly investigated.
Early work on language use in rural Africa tended to background the presence of multilingualism and was dominated by an approach that viewed each community (or “tribe”) as having its own language. Thanks to the progressive adoption of ethnographic methods of inquiry, facilitated by language documentation research especially since the beginning of the 21st century, it has been possible to more effectively study areas of high linguistic diversity in West and Central Africa which demonstrate that multilingualism plays an integral role in structuring social relations. Available case studies document the presence of individuals with linguistic repertoires that are primarily oriented around local languages, ideologies, and practices and that do not clearly fit with what is known from urban environments. The most important theme that emerges from this work is the extent to which rural multilingualism is linked to the specific dynamics holding among communities that are near to each other rather than being a reflection of a more general, externally imposed value system.
While this result makes it difficult to characterize rural multilingualism as a single, coherent phenomenon, it does point to the utility of a shared toolkit of research strategies for exploring it in more detail. In particular, ethnographic methods are required in order to ascertain the major local social divisions which language choice both reflects and constructs in these areas, and it is additionally important to focus on how individual repertoires are tied to specific life histories rather than to assume that groupings that are salient to the outside researcher (e.g., “villages” or “compounds”) are the relevant units of analysis.
Finally, investigation of multilingualism in rural Africa is not only valuable for what it reveals about social dynamics on the continent, but it also seems likely to yield important insights for the study of sociolinguistics more broadly.
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Article
Multilingualism in Rural Africa
Pierpaolo Di Carlo, Jeff Good, and Rachel Ojong Diba
Article
Nominal Inflectional Morphology in Germanic: Adjectives
Hans-Olav Enger
The article surveys the different types of adjective inflection: gradation and agreement. Agreement inflection on adjectives in Germanic can involve gender, number, case, and strong/weak (definiteness). The languages differ in their agreement inflection. The different modes of exponence for the different inflections are shown (e.g., periphrasis, affixation, and vowel change). There are adjectives that are defective and those that are completely indeclinable. The article also surveys deviations such as suppletion and syncretisms. The article shows how the notion of construction may be relevant for Germanic adjective inflection, how there is a difference between attributive and predicative use in that the former typically involves “more inflection,” and this is also shown for cases of semantic agreement. Perhaps some differences between Germanic languages in their adjective inflection relate to sociolinguistic factors.
Article
Norwegian
Agnete Nesse
Norwegian is mainly spoken in Norway and is represented in writing by two written languages, Bokmål (90%) and Nynorsk (10%). Both would work well as a written standard for the whole country but are to some extent regionally distributed. The distribution is partly based on the dialects and their likeness to one of the two written standards, and partly on tradition and ideology. There is no codified standard spoken Norwegian, so in formal settings the choice is either to approximate to one of the written standards, or to simply use dialect, which is most often the case.
Norwegian is part of the Scandinavian dialect continuum. Due to geography and historical developments in the region, most Norwegians easily understand spoken Swedish but sometimes struggle with written Swedish. Conversely, they easily understand written Danish but sometimes struggle with spoken Danish. Einar Haugen pinned the term Semi Communication to the almost mutual understanding between speakers of Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. Between Norwegian and the insular Nordic varieties Icelandic and Faroese, there is no mutual intelligibility.
Norwegian has both synthetic and analytic language characteristics. Grammatical meaning is partly conveyed morphologically by endings and partly syntactically through word order. The vocabulary is, apart from a group of loanwords from Greek and Latin, almost solely Germanic. Due to the influence from German (Low and High), Danish, and English, parts of Norwegian vocabulary will be recognizable to speakers of other Germanic varieties. The influence caused by the century-long language contact between Sami, Finnish, and Norwegian has not led to great changes in the vocabulary, but, regionally, dialects have changed due to this contact. The part of Norwegian vocabulary that has been retained from Old Norse is to some degree recognizable to modern speakers, but Old Norse as such is not comprehensible to a modern Norwegian reader.
Typical grammatical features of Norwegian are
1. A relatively homogenous vowel inventory of nine vowels, and a heterogenous consonant system in which the dialects differ between 17 and more than 25 different phonemes.
2. Two distinctive tonemes in most dialects.
3. Suffixed definite article.
4. V2 word order
Article
Phonological Variation and Change in European French
Nigel Armstrong
We discuss here the considerable amount of phonological variation and change in European French in the varieties spoken in France, Belgium, and Switzerland, the major francophone countries of Europe. The data discussed here derive from the perceptual and especially behavioral studies that have sought to extend the Labovian paradigm beyond Anglo-American variable linguistic phenomena to bear upon Romance. Regarding France, what emerges is a surprisingly high degree of uniformity in pronunciation, at least over the non-southern part of the country, and most Southern French varieties are also showing convergence to the Parisian norm. Pockets of resistance to this tendency are nevertheless observable. The Belgian and Swiss situations have in common the looming presence of a supralocal and indeed supranational norm playing a role often attested in other discussions of standard or legitimized languages, that of the variety representing what commonly corresponds to the nonlocal. Indeed, it may be that Belgium and Switzerland typify the local–standard relation most often reported, while the French situation, because of its relatively leveled character, is less easily described as one of standardization.
Article
Phonological Variation and Change in Latin American Spanish
Pedro Martín-Butragueño and Érika Mendoza
“Latin American Spanish” (LAS) represents a substantial portion of the Spanish-speaking world. The geographical distances, the contrasts between rural and extremely urbanized areas, the existence of strong social inequalities and migratory streams, and the presence of a high number of indigenous American languages—all create the conditions for a complex linguistic reality, clearly diversified, while also unitary. Many variable linguistic phenomena correlate with the age of LAS expansion and the continuing massive urbanization that began in the 1960s.
American Spanish-speaking communities have different segmental processes, such as consonantal weakening in intervocalic contexts, deletion in syllabic coda, vowel devoicing, among others. On the prosodic level, there is dialectal variation in intonational patterns and differences in rhythmic properties. Both segmental and prosodic variation is conditioned by linguistic, geographical, and social factors.
Article
Pidgin Languages
Mikael Parkvall
Pidgin languages sometimes form in contact situations where a means of communication is urgently needed between groups lacking a common code. They are typically less elaborate than any of the languages involved in their formation, and in comparison to those, reduction characterizes all linguistic levels.
The process is relatively uncommon, and the life span of pidgins is usually short – most disappear when the contact situation changes, or when another medium of intergroup communication becomes available. In some rare cases, however, they expand (both socially and structurally), and may even nativize, i. e. become mother tongues to their speakers (when they may be re-labelled “creoles”).
Pidgins are severely understudied, and while they are often mentioned as precursors to creoles, few linguists have shown a serious interest in them. As a result, many generalizations have been based on extremely limited amounts of data or even on intuition. Some frequently occurring ones is that pidginization is a case of second language acquisition, that power and prestige are important factors, and that most structures are derived from the input languages. My work with pidgins has led me to believe the opposite to be true in these cases: pidgins form through a trial-and-error process, where anything that is understood by the other party is sanctioned, this process is one of collaborative language creation (rather than one involving one group of teachers and one group of learners), and much of what finds its way in the resultant contact language do so independently of what the creators spoke prior to their encounter.
As for theoretical implications, pidgins may shed light on which features in traditional languages are necessary for communication, and which are superfluous from the point of view of pure information transmission.
Article
Pidgins and Creoles With Germanic Lexifier Languages
Peter Bakker
There are pidgins with Dutch, English, German, and Scandinavian lexifiers, and creoles with Dutch (three), German (one), and English (dozens) lexifiers. Pidgins and creoles have been documented in all parts of the world. They have developed in contact between Europeans and indigenous populations, often as part of the colonial enterprise. Pidgins are often associated with trade and initial phases of contact, and they do not display all design features of natural languages, whereas creoles tend to be mother tongues and complex natural languages. Pidgins that have developed into creoles may maintain the original label “pidgin” (e.g., Tok Pisin < Talk Pidgin), even though they have developed into full-fledged complex languages and hence creoles, or pidgincreoles. Germanic-lexifier pidgins share properties with other pidgins, such as invariant forms for nouns and verbs, personal pronouns, optional tense marking, lack of aspect marking, and a limited lexicon. Germanic creoles likewise share properties with other creoles, such as preverbal marking of aspect, mood, and/or tense, the development of optional plural marking, and the presence of definite and indefinite articles. Germanic pidgins, however, often show articles, whereas other pidgins rarely display them. Creole languages worldwide share a number of properties, in that similar grammatical categories developed independently from one another, after having lost most of the grammatical system of the lexifiers. Most creole languages are associated with forced population displacement (blackbirding, slavery), but the German creole Unserdeutsch of Papua New Guinea is associated with a school. The three Dutch-lexifier creoles came into being in Guyana and the Virgin Islands, and they all developed independently. Berbice Dutch Creole is quite deviant, and several theories have been launched to explain the presence of a significant component from one specific Nigerian language, Eastern Ijo. English-lexifier creoles are conveniently divided into two groups, Pacific creoles and Atlantic creoles. Both groups seem to go back to one source, judged by the quantity of shared lexical and grammatical similarities that are so specific that they cannot be due to independent processes of creolization. There are also mixed languages and other contact phenomena involving Germanic languages, and a full list of these is provided with selected references.
Article
Raeto-Romance: Romansh, Ladin, Friulian
Luca Melchior
Raeto-Romance languages are spoken in northeastern Italy and (south)eastern Switzerland. They are subdivided into three major groups: Romansh, with about 40,000 speakers in Switzerland; Dolomite Ladin, with about 30,000 speakers in the Italian South Tyrol, Trentino, and Veneto; and Friulian—whose speaker number is estimated between 420,000 and 600,000—in the Italian Friuli and in eastern Veneto. The (supposed) linguistic unity of these subgroups bases on phonological and morphological features like the retention of Lat. clusters C+l, sigmatic noun plural, sigmatic second-person singular ending, palatalization of Lat. c
a
, g
a
, and syncope of proparoxytones, which separate them from Italian dialects. Other features, such as verb–subject (clitic) inversion in interrogative sentences, are more or less spread, and others like periphrastic future or differential object marking are characteristic only for one or few subvarieties. The unity (and uniqueness) of the Raeto-Romance group is hardly debated.
The three groups do not have a common history and do not correspond to a unique political entity. Therefore, they show different language contact phenomena, whereby Romansh and Dolomite Ladin are characterized by a strong influence from German, while Friulian has been historically influenced by Germanic and Slavic languages, but much more from Venetan and Italian. Standardization efforts do not have the same success in the three areas: rumantsch grischun and Standard Friulian dominate in the official written uses in Grisons and Friuli, whereas the use of ladin dolomitan is more marginal. Romansh and Dolomite Ladin are compulsory subjects in school education while Friulian is only an optional subject.
Article
Romance in Contact with Slavic in Southern and South-Eastern Europe
Walter Breu
In Romance–Slavic language contact, both language families have had foreign influence, with Romance varieties as donor and as recipient languages. Slavic has been in contact with languages of the Latin phylum at least since the first encounters of South-Slavic tribes with the Balkan–Romance population in the 6th century ce. Mutual language contact became especially visible in South-Slavic influence on Romanian and its South Danubian varieties (Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian) and also the other way round, in the form of Romance borrowings in the Serbo-Croatian (Bosnian–Croatian–Montenegrin, Serbian) continuum, Bulgarian / Macedonian, and Slovene. However, pre-Balkan contacts of Proto-Slavic with Italic or Latin have also been claimed.
Balkan Latin derived from common Latin and split into Western and Eastern Balkan Romance, forming the basis of local Romance vernaculars, with (extinct) Dalmatian in the west of the peninsula and Proto-Romanian in the east. Proto-Romanian and Old Bulgarian mutually influenced each other, which led to a divergent position of Romanian and Bulgarian / Macedonian in their respective language families. Mutual Romance–Slavic language contact continued even after the Middle Ages, between Romanian, Italo-Romance, French, and Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Bulgarian / Macedonian.
The vocabulary of all Balkan languages and varieties in contact has been heavily affected by words and concepts of the respective contact languages—in the case of Romanian-based varieties as a donor language by distributing shepherd and dairy terminology throughout South Slavic. As for grammar, Macedonian developed a possessive perfect by copying the Aromanian model.
In the situation of South-Slavic minority languages in all-embracing contact with Italo-Romance in southern and northern Italy, many contact-induced developments occurred, not only in the lexicon but also in the grammatical system. Examples of the effect of 500 years of bilingualism of the Molise Slavs, following immigration from Dalmatia to southern Italy in the 16th century, include the loss of the locative due to the homonymic expression of motion and state in the Italo-Romance donor varieties, the loss of the neuter gender of nouns, and the preservation of a fully functional imperfect. Others are the formation of a new de-obligative future and a venitive passive. Loans were fully integrated in the existing morphological systems, for example, by developing special integration rules for verbs, including a procedure of forming aspectual pairs from telic source verbs. One thousand years of Romance–Slavic contact have had similar effects on Slovene-based Resian in northeastern Italy, although to a lesser extent.
The opposite case of Slavic (Croatian) influence on a Romance microlanguage is found in far-reaching contact-induced changes in Istro-Romanian grammar, such as the rise of a neuter gender and, especially, the development, at least in part, of a Slavic-type aspect category, formally marked by affixes.
The numeral systems of the recipient languages have often been restructured by the influence of their donor languages, resulting, as a rule, in mixed systems with higher numbers (starting from 5) being predominantly of foreign provenience. The Slavic way of counting teens (one on ten, etc.) has spread throughout the Balkans.
Article
Social Network Approach in African Sociolinguistics
Klaus Beyer and Henning Schreiber
The Social Network Analysis approach (SNA), also known as sociometrics or actor-network analysis, investigates social structure on the basis of empirically recorded social ties between actors. It thereby aims to explain e.g. the processes of flow of information, spreading of innovations, or even pathogens throughout the network by actor roles and their relative positions in the network based on quantitative and qualitative analyses. While the approach has a strong mathematical and statistical component, the identification of pertinent social ties also requires a strong ethnographic background. With regard to social categorization, SNA is well suited as a bootstrapping technique for highly dynamic communities and under-documented contexts. Currently, SNA is widely applied in various academic fields. For sociolinguists, it offers a framework for explaining the patterning of linguistic variation and mechanisms of language change in a given speech community.
The social tie perspective developed around 1940, in the field of sociology and social anthropology based on the ideas of Simmel, and was applied later in fields such as innovation theory. In sociolinguistics, it is strongly connected to the seminal work of Lesley and James Milroy and their Belfast studies (1978, 1985). These authors demonstrate that synchronic speaker variation is not only governed by broad societal categories but is also a function of communicative interaction between speakers. They argue that the high level of resistance against linguistic change in the studied community is a result of strong and multiplex ties between the actors. Their approach has been followed by various authors, including Gal, Lippi-Green, and Labov, and discussed for a variety of settings; most of them, however, are located in the Western world.
The methodological advantages could make SNA the preferred framework for variation studies in Africa due to the prevailing dynamic multilingual conditions, often on the backdrop of less standardized languages. However, rather few studies using SNA as a framework have yet been conducted. This is possibly due to the quite demanding methodological requirements, the overall effort, and the often highly complex linguistic backgrounds. A further potential obstacle is the pace of theoretical development in SNA. Since its introduction to sociolinguistics, various new measures and statistical techniques have been developed by the fast growing SNA community. Receiving this vast amount of recent literature and testing new concepts is likewise a challenge for the application of SNA in sociolinguistics.
Nevertheless, the overall methodological effort of SNA has been much reduced by the advancements in recording technology, data processing, and the introduction of SNA software (UCINET) and packages for network statistics in R (‘sna’). In the field of African sociolinguistics, a more recent version of SNA has been implemented in a study on contact-induced variation and change in Pana and Samo, two speech communities in the Northwest of Burkina Faso. Moreover, further enhanced applications are on the way for Senegal and Cameroon, and even more applications in the field of African languages are to be expected.
Article
Spanish in Contact with South-American Languages, with Special Emphasis on Andean and Paraguayan Spanish
Fernando Zúñiga
The effect of indigenous languages of South America on Spanish is strongest in the lexicon (especially with toponyms, zoonyms, and phytonyms) and identifiable, but much more modest, in phonetics/phonology (e.g., vowel variability and reduction and nasalization) and morphosyntax (e.g., the different use of selected verb forms and constituent order). The phenomena called Media Lengua and Yopará differ from this picture in that the former roughly consists of a Spanish lexicon combined with Quechua grammar, while the latter is a fluid Guaraní-based system with numerous borrowings from Spanish. The effects of contact are socially and areally variable, with low-prestige, typically rural, varieties of South American Spanish showing the most significant systemic impact, while high-prestige, typically urban, varieties (including the national standards) show little more than lexical borrowings in the semantic fields mentioned. This result is hardly surprising, due to historical/sociolinguistic factors (which often led to situations of dominance and language shift) and to the typological dissimilarities between Spanish and the indigenous languages (which typically hinders borrowing, especially of morphological elements).
Article
Swedish
Erik M. Petzell
Swedish is a V2 language, like all Germanic except English, with a basic VO word order and a suffixed definite article, like all North Germanic. Swedish is the largest of the North Germanic languages, and the official language of both Sweden and Finland, in the latter case alongside the majority language Finnish. Worldwide, there are about 10.5 million first-language (L1) speakers. The extent of L2 Swedish speakers is unclear: In Sweden and Finland alone, there are at least 3 million L2 speakers. Genealogically, Swedish is closest to Danish. Together, they formed the eastern branch of North Germanic during the Viking age. Today, this unity of old is often obscured by later developments. Typologically, in the early 21st century, Swedish is closer to Norwegian than to Danish.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was great dialectal variation across the Swedish-speaking area. Very few of the traditional dialects have survived into the present, however. In the early 21st century, there are only some isolated areas, where spoken standard Swedish has not completely taken over, for example, northwestern Dalecarlia. Spoken standard Swedish is quite close to the written language. This written-like speech was promoted by primary school teachers from the late 19th century onward. In the 21st century, it comes in various regional guises, which differ from each other prosodically and display some allophonic variation, for example, in the realization of /r/.
During the late Middle Ages, Swedish was in close contact with Middle Low German. This had a massive impact on the lexicon, leading to loans in both the open and closed classes and even import of derivational morphology. Structurally, Swedish lost case and verbal agreement morphology, developed mandatory expletive subjects, and changed its word order in subordinate clauses. Swedish shares much of this development with Danish and Norwegian.
In the course of the early modern era, Swedish and Norwegian converged further, developing very similar phonological systems. The more conspicuous of the shared traits include two different rounded high front vowels, front /y/ and front-central /ʉ/, palatalization of initial /k/ and /g/ before front vowels, and a preserved phonemic tonal distinction.
As for morphosyntax, however, Swedish has sometimes gone its own way, distancing itself from both Norwegian and Danish. For instance, Swedish has a distinct non-agreeing active participle (supine), and it makes use of the morphological s-passive in a wider variety of contexts than Danish and Norwegian. Moreover, verbal particles always precede even light objects in Swedish, for example, ta upp den, literally ‘take up it’, while Danish and Norwegian patterns with, for example, English: tag den op/ta den opp, literally ‘take it up’. Furthermore, finite forms of auxiliary have may be deleted in subordinate clauses in Swedish but never in Danish/Norwegian.
Article
Toward a Sociolinguistics of Modern Sub-Saharan African South–South Migrations
Cécile B. Vigouroux
Despite their large demographic size, intra-continental African migrations have hardly been taken into account in the theorizing on migration in transnational studies and related fields. Research questions have been framed predominantly from a South-to-North perspective on population movements. This may be a consequence of the fact that the extent and complexity of modern population movements and contacts within Africa are hard to assess, owing mainly to lack of reliable data. For sociolinguists the challenge is even greater, partly because of the spotty knowledge of linguistic diversity in the continent and the scarcity of adequate sociolinguistic descriptions of the ways in which Africans manage their language repertoires. Despite these limitations, a sociolinguistics of intra-continental African migrations will contribute significantly to a better understanding of the conditions, nature, and periodicity of population contacts and interactional dynamics. It will help explain why geographic mobility entails reshaping sociocultural practices, including the language repertoires of both the migrants and the people they come in contact with. Moreover, the peculiarity of African economies, which rely heavily on informal non-institutionalized practices, prompts a rethinking of assumptions regarding the acquisition of the host country’s language(s) as the primary facilitator of the migrants’ socioeconomic inclusion. A sociolinguistic understanding of migrations within Africa can help to formulate new questions and enrich the complex pictures that the study of other parts of the world has already shaped.
Article
World Englishes
Edgar W. Schneider
English clearly is the world’s most widely used language in the early 21st century: the language of formal and other interactions in very many countries, the main tool of globalization, and the default choice for transnational communication. Initially, the expansion of the British Empire, beginning in the 17th century and driven by various motives for colonization, brought it to all continents: North America and the Caribbean, the southern hemisphere (including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and other territories), and also Asia, Africa, and the Pacific region. In contact with indigenous languages new, increasingly stable and localized varieties of English with properties and functions of their own have grown in many countries. These varieties have come to be summarily labeled as “World Englishes,” and a new subdiscipline in linguistics has emerged since the 1980s investigating their features and conditions of use. They have conventionally been classified according to their status in specific countries and territories, as native, second, or foreign languages, respectively, and several theoretical models have been proposed to account for their status, developments, and mutual relationships. Vibrant changes of the recent past, broadly associated with a sociolinguistics of globalization and increasing superdiversity, have continued to push the dissemination of English to new contexts, both socially and individually, and a “post-varieties approach” is now being envisaged.
A wide range of facts and issues can be discussed and investigated when addressing World Englishes. The basic perspective, obviously, concerns the sociohistorical diffusion of the language: Who brought English to which territories, when, and why? And how has the language been transformed in different places? It has been argued convincingly (in the “Dynamic Model” of the evolution of Postcolonial Englishes) that despite all geographical, historical, and social differences, amazing similarities in the emergence of these new varieties, grounded in principles of sociolinguistic accommodation and identity transformations, can be identified. In all contexts and territories, contact with local and other languages has been determinative, usually via the process of second-language acquisition of English by indigenous people. Language policies and their implementation by means of strategies of language pedagogy have played a major role, and all of this is shaped decisively by linguistic attitudes—the question of what speakers and authorities believe about such emerging varieties and their relationship to norms of correctness. Also, specific structural patterns and types of linguistic phenomena can be observed in all these varieties on all levels of language organization.
Consequently, the notion of “English” today needs to be retuned from thinking of it as a single, monolithic entity, a linguistic “standard” and a reference system, to understanding it as a set of related, structurally overlapping, but also distinct varieties, the products of a fundamental “glocalization” process with variable, context-dependent outcomes.
Article
Yiddish
Lea Schäfer
The Yiddish language is directly linked to the culture and destiny of the Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe. It originated as the everyday language of the Jewish population in the German-speaking lands around the Middle Ages and underwent a series of developments until the Shoah, which took a particularly large toll on the Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish population. Today, Yiddish is spoken as a mother tongue almost exclusively in ultra-Orthodox communities, where it is now exposed to entirely new influences and is, thus, far from being a dead language.
After an introductory sketch, information on the geographical distribution and number of speakers as well as key historical developments are briefly summarized. Particularly important are the descriptions of the various sociolinguistic situations and the source situation. This is followed by a description of various (failed) attempts at standardization, as well as the geographical distribution and surveys of the dialects. The following section describes the status of Yiddish in the early 21st century, which overlaps with the sociolinguistic situation of Orthodox Yiddish. Finally, the linguistic features of modern Eastern Yiddish (dialects, standard, and Orthodox) are presented. In this context, linguistic levels and structures in which Yiddish differs from other (standard) Germanic languages are also discussed. Since Yiddish, as a language derived from Middle High German, is particularly close to German varieties, the differences and similarities between the two languages are particularly emphasized.
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