With the introduction of free compulsory elementary education by laws passed in 1881 and 1882, French children were exposed to the standard language as a matter of course. By the end of the First World War, therefore, a majority of the population was, for the first time, competent in French, as well as, or instead of, a regional or local dialect. However, this national language has always exhibited variation, including in its morphology and syntax, and this variation has often been a driving force behind change. Loci of variation include competing morphological exponents (‘overabundance’), morphomic (autonomously morphological) structure, the expression of number and gender, use of tenses and moods, agreement, negation, interrogation, and dislocation of elements to the beginning or end of the sentence. Geography and social class may still have some effect on variation in French, although it is often argued that their influence has largely been leveled, with style and register becoming more significant factors.
Article
Morphological and Syntactic Variation and Change in European French
John Charles Smith
Article
Germanic Languages in Contact in North America
Michael T. Putnam
Over the course of 400 years, numerous speakers of Germanic languages have immigrated to North America. The primary purposes of these immigrations were to avoid political and religious persecution and seek economic stability and growth. These contact varieties of Germanic origin are the intense focus of linguistic research involving multiple sub-disciplines within the field (e.g., sociolinguistic, structural/formal, corpus, and experimental approaches). A deeper investigation into the exact nature of the factors and subsequent results of language shift and structural outcomes found in these varieties challenges a number of long-standing assumptions about language contact, shift, and change in these intense contact settings. First, upon closer inspection, calls for severe language attrition, decay, and loss are largely unattested, which divert the focus from reported language shift to a transition to a post-vernacular state of the contact language in a given area. Second, the specific outcomes of language attrition, innovation, and maintenance in various structural domains of grammar of these individuals and communities (e.g., phonetics/phonology, morphology, mental lexicon, syntax, etc.) provide a basis for comparison both within and beyond this language family. These comparisons enable linguistics to better understand the directions and limits of structural changes in contact Germanic, which can be applied to other populations past and present. Third, these findings collectively contribute broadly to research in contact and heritage linguistics, providing invaluable cross-linguistic data from multiple dyads (including those with non-European ethnic and linguistic backgrounds). Research on these vernaculars advances our collective understanding of contact and diasporic Germanic varieties around the world while additionally making lasting contributions to research on contact and heritage linguistics.
Article
Hip-Hop Language and Linguistics
Andrew S. Ross and Elina Westinen
A significant sociopolitical event in New York City led to the emergence of the hip-hop musical genre, which is now a critical part of global popular culture and the performance landscape. In general terms, hip-hop, and in particular rap, can be understood as a form of spoken word or rhymed storytelling, accompanied by music. In the 1970s, the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway (1948–1972) effectively displaced many residents from the South Bronx, an area where residents were already faced with high levels of unemployment and poverty. These social conditions led to the birth of hip-hop as a performative genre that provided a space for the marginalized to express their voice. These non-mainstream origins and the limited political and societal power that accompanied these conditions led to hip-hop being seen as a form of resistance. Since these times, hip-hop has broken into the mainstream and is now a multi-billion-dollar part of the music industry.
While hip-hop has grown as a genre of music and popular culture, so too has its reach on the global scale. Initially, this meant moving beyond New York, where different variations in African American English were incorporated along with more localized social and political concerns. Later, hip-hop began to spread around the world with a particularly unique ability to cross social, cultural, and geographic boundaries, as well as sociolinguistic boundaries. Emerging in various locations, it has proved its capacity to become translocal, taking on distinctly local features in a process of establishing authenticity inclusive of slang, dialect, accent, and phonological features as well as cultural markers and references to local political and social agendas. Hip-hop’s movement around the world has seen the emergence of important work on varieties of hip-hop. The underlying thesis here is that the localization of hip-hop is not merely global hip-hop adding in a few local features, but that it is always local, particularly in its linguistic features and general thematic and topical concerns.
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
Raciolinguistics
Jennifer Phuong, María Cioè-Peña, and Arianna Chinchilla
Raciolinguistics, or the study of language in relation to race, is an emergent field primarily stemming from U.S. academia and centering critical theories, including educational and applied linguistics. There currently exists a debate as to whether the theories that undergird raciolinguistics should be the grounding for a field (i.e., raciolinguistics) or a theoretical underpinning (i.e., raciolinguistic perspectives/ideologies) of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, particularly works that are rooted in the embodied experiences of racialized people. H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball edited a volume that brought together scholars whose works address the intersection of race and language to consider raciolinguistics as a field. Still, others believe it is necessary to understand phenomena that go beyond named languages while still rooted in hierarchical conceptualizations of race. As such, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa have introduced and continue to build on a raciolinguistic perspective by rooting contemporary phenomena in colonial histories. Using this lens, they position language evaluations and assessments of racialized people as extensions of colonial racial projects rooted in dehumanization and commodification. Since then, scholars from multiple fields have engaged with raciolinguistics and raciolinguistic ideologies to explore language and race using a variety of methods (e.g., discourse analysis, mixed methods), contexts (e.g., diverse places and participants), scales (e.g., policy, interpersonal interactions), and institutions (e.g., healthcare, education). Regardless of the specific framing of raciolinguistics, the field and perspective both foreground racial and linguistic justice.
Article
Translanguaging
Ricardo Otheguy and Ofelia García
Translanguaging frames the study of bilingualism within theoretical and applied linguistics in a way that transcends the speaker’s separate codes or languages, named or not. These codes or languages are regarded as possessing a social ontology but not a cognitive linguistic one. While linguistic features such as (depending on the theory) phonemes, morphemes, sentences, lexical and grammatical signs, constructions, rules, checks, movements, derivations, and so on can legitimately be seen as cognitively real by their different proponents, their allocation to different languages or codes cannot. The separate allocation of these linguistic features to separate codes or languages is of considerable social relevance to the individuals and communities said to be using them, but should not be uncritically translated into representations of two separate grammars. Under translanguaging, named languages (Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, English, Hindi, Quechua, Spanish, Swahili, Yoruba, etc.) exist only as sociopolitically institutionalized constructions, not as objects endowed with psycholinguistic reality.
The term translanguaging makes reference to the following 10 interconnected and mutually supporting proposals: (a) a broadly conceived pedagogical alternative to the strict language separation typical of many language education programs; (b) a denial of the dual correspondence hypothesis about the repertoire of bilinguals, under which the sociocultural conception of bilinguals as having two separate languages is assumed to reflect a dual cognitive representation; (c) the adoption of an alternative representation involving a unitary repertoire of linguistic features, under which a single inventory of lexical and morphosyntactic units best describes the psycholinguistics of bilingualism; (d) an integrated view of bilingual speech performance, under which speakers pick and choose from their unitary repertoire the lexical and morphosyntactic features appropriate to the moment, the context, and the interlocutor; (e) the denial that this process of selection sometimes constitutes normal or unmarked language use but other times involves mixing or switching between languages or codes; (f) the necessary rejection, if the above are to be implemented, of the idea that only the language practices of speakers with institutional power in Western societies are normal and universal; (g) the related recognition that named languages have gone hand in hand with the historical process of colonial expansion and nation-building, which relied on named languages to establish its system of control, including particularly the control of minoritized speakers, especially minoritized children in school; (h) the related critique of the abyssal thinking that has prevented scholars in Europe and the United States from seeing what lies across the abyssal line dividing the geographic and philosophical North from the modes of knowledge of the South; (i) the adoption of the scholarship of the Global South, dealing with the transformation of pedagogical practices to recognize the dynamic bilingualism of language learners, replacing in many settings the now outdated notion of additive bilingualism; and finally and perhaps most importantly, (j) the affirmation of a view of schooling for fluent or emergent bilingual students that focuses not exclusively on the teaching and assessment of named languages but of communicative capacities broadly conceived that reflect the autochthonous practices of bilinguals and their communities.
Article
Social Variation in Germanic
Tore Kristiansen
The spread of Germanic-speaking people and their language(s) has been extraordinarily expansive and extensive and has produced variation under multifarious socio-historical conditions—first as “dialect continua” in Western and Northern Europe, later as “language mixing” of many kinds under colonial situations, and, in the early 21st century, as “urban youth styles” in multicultural or multilinguistic parts of bigger cities. Basically, the social conditions include relationships of domination and subordination at three social levels—macro, meso, and micro—and across three types of space—geographic, social, and situational. Spread happens with contact between speakers. This contact is always social (at all levels and in all spaces) and has an objective aspect (social roles and patterns of communication) and a subjective aspect (language-related ideologies). The pivotal question in this picture is why language speakers in interactional contact vary (and potentially change) their language. What is the driving force in language variation (and change)? Are the processes of variation (and potentially change) automatic/mechanic by nature, or are they sociopsychological/ideological? Of course, scholars working in the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics (now 60-plus years old) have not all related to the various ingredients of the preceding picture in the same way and with the same research interests, so the gamut of questions asked and answers given is broad.
Article
Unspecified Human Subjects in the Romance Languages
Pekka Posio
The term unspecified human subjects refers to syntactic constructions profiling a human subject participant whose identity is either not specified at all or is left underspecified, for instance by limiting the scope of potential referents either by choice of verb (e.g., They have raised taxes again) or by a locative expression (e.g., In Spain they eat late). Such constructions include human impersonal pronouns grammaticalized from nouns meaning ‘man’ or ‘person’ (e.g., French on, Portuguese a pessoa) or based on the numeral ‘one’ (e.g., Spanish uno), as well as impersonal (i.e., unspecified, generic, or arbitrary, depending on the theoretical framework) uses of personal pronouns and verb forms, in particular the second-person singular and the third-person plural. Unspecified human subjects present functional overlap with other human impersonal constructions such as the periphrastic passive and reflexive-based passives and impersonals (i.e., Romance se/si constructions), however differing from them in that the unspecified human argument is not the syntactic subject in these latter constructions. While it has been argued that man-impersonal constructions are either restricted or more frequent in languages with obligatory subject expression (e.g., French) and pronoun-based human impersonals are more frequent in so-called null subject languages (e.g., Italian, Spanish), some Romance languages and language varieties display both types, thus providing interesting data for the study of variation.
Article
Phonological Variation and Change in Catalan
Josefina Carrera-Sabaté
The article gives an overview of the origin and vitality of several ongoing processes of change in Catalan. In the area of consonants, it presents (a) the existing alternation between [ʎ] and [j] or [ʝ] (and [ʒ]) in Eastern Catalan and (b) the variation between post-alveolo-palatal fricatives and affricates in different positions in word-initial, post-consonantal, intervocalic, and word-final position, also taking into account Eastern and Western Catalan dialects. In the area of vowels, the article presents the variation that exists within the stressed and unstressed vowel systems in Catalan: (a) The stressed vowel systems have different mid vowels among the Catalan dialects, and these vowels present important differences in openness; (b) the unstressed vowel systems of Catalan split vowel variation within Catalan dialects into two main groups (Eastern and Western) taking into account the scope of vowel reduction and, in particular, the phonological mechanisms of these groups. The article also contains a description of variable patterns of intonation in Catalan regarding assertions, imperatives, and questions. These patterns are closely tied to pragmatics, with questions having the most variable patterns among Catalan dialects.
The generalized observation of the ongoing processes of variation and change allows the conclusion that schooling in Catalan and the teaching of written Catalan, after a dictatorship that prohibited it, are bringing about changes in pronunciation that are especially conditioned by the written language. These changes tend to be led by the youngest generations in the urban centers that have the most influence over their respective administrative zones. These are important enclaves for the spread of linguistic changes and are areas in which contact with and use of Spanish and, in the early 21st century, other languages are also leaving a mark on phonetics.
Article
Germanic Languages in Contact in Central and South America
Karoline Kühl
West and North Germanic language varieties have been part of the Latin American language ecology since the middle of the 19th century, when European mass migration created Germanic-speaking immigrant communities in North, Central, and South America. The subsequent fate of the Germanic immigrant varieties in Latin America varied greatly in terms of how long intergenerational transfer has been maintained, if and to what degree language maintenance has been supported by linguistic codification and language teaching, and the degree of contact with the surrounding majority population. Some languages like the Mennonite Low German varieties have been quite repellent with regard to language change induced by contact with the majority languages Portuguese and/or Spanish, other (Germanic) immigrant varieties, and indigenous languages. However, contact with the majority population and other (immigrant) ethnic groups, bilingualism, and, accordingly, the influence of Spanish and/or Portuguese has been growing for most Germanic immigrant varieties at least since the 1950s.
The long-standing German dialectological research tradition into extra-territorial Germanic language islands has led to detailed accounts of many German varieties in Latin America. Accounts of other Germanic varieties are much more restricted, both in numbers and in extent: Some like Argentine Danish or Patagonian Afrikaans have been described only recently; others, like Swedish in Brazil and Argentine Dutch, hardly at all. In all cases, the accounts differ greatly regarding if, and to what extent, language contact is included as a cause of language change. Based on the scholarly coverage, the extent of contact-induced change in the Germanic varieties in Latin America appears to vary greatly, but whether this impression is due to the varying degrees of attention that the accounts devote to the effects of language contact or to particular sociolinguistic circumstances preventing or promoting language contact cannot be established. Still, contact linguistic profiles of many Germanic immigrant varieties in Latin America present themselves as a promising terra incognita for future research.
From a bird’s-eye perspective, we may in general terms conclude that the Germanic varieties in Latin America are characterized by lexical borrowing, at least for cultural loans and discourse-structuring elements, as well as ad hoc code-switching. Interestingly, a number of varieties show a similar pattern of integrating Spanish or Portuguese verb stems of verbs ending in -ir and -ar into a very similar inflectional Germanic paradigm (Misiones Swedish -era, Argentine Danish -is(ere), Riograndenser Hunsrückisch -ieren, Volga German -i(:)ere). In general, syntactical restructurings seem to be restricted, with the notable exception of standard deviant omission of mainly pronominal subjects and, partly, pronominal objects. Other developments are specific, applying only to individual varieties.
