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1. Language and Contact
SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Summarized from
SOCIOLINGUISTICS
An Introduction to Language and Society
Peter Trudgill
4th edition. 2000,
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2. Chapter 9
Language and Contact
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3. Language Contact
• Geographical spread of a language results in a “language contact” situation.
This means that the spreading language is used by speakers of other languages.
• Language contact occurs in a variety of phenomena, including language
convergence, borrowing, and relexification.
• The most common products of language contact are pidgins, creoles, borrowing,
code-switching, and code-mixing.
• The use of a language by speakers of other languages is often different from its
use by native speakers.
• A language that is used non natively by speakers of other languages for
communication is described as a “lingua franca”.
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4. What is a lingua franca?
• A lingua franca is a language which is used as a means of
communication among people who have no native
language in common.
• In the past, Arabic became the "lingua franca" of the
Islamic World (from AD 733 - AD 1492), which at a
certain point spread from the borders of China and
Northern India through Central Asia, Persia, Asia Minor,
Middle East, North Africa all the way to the Iberian
Peninsula in the west.
• Presently, English is considered a “lingua franca” of the
World
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5. Where did the term ‘lingua franca’ come
from?
• Lingua franca referred originally to a mixed language
composed mostly of Italian with a broad vocabulary
drawn from Turkish, French, Spanish, Greek and Arabic.
• This language was limited to the Eastern Mediterranean as
the language of commerce and diplomacy in and around
the Renaissance era.
• Franca was the Italian word for Frankish. Its usage in the
term lingua franca originated from its meaning in Arabic,
dating from before the Crusades, whereby all Europeans
were called "Franks" or Firinjah in Arabic.
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6. How is a lingua franca different from
other languages?
• The use of a language as a lingua franca reflects a rather
interesting aspect of linguistic phenomena.
• Unlike native languages, the use of a language as a lingua
franca is often limited to certain social situations.
• A language used in limited social contexts (as a lingua
franca) usually undergoes a certain amount of
simplification and reduction and will be characterized
by errors caused by interference from the speakers’ native
languages.
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7. What is simplification?
• Simplification refers to the getting red of
irregularities, such as irregular verb forms,
redundancies, such as grammatical gender, and the
avoidance of certain complex syntactic structure, in
the lingua franca.
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8. What is reduction?
• As a result of a reduction in social function, lingua franca
speakers may use the language for doing business or
commerce, but not perhaps for many other purposes.
• This means that parts of the language, such as vocabulary,
grammatical structures, and stylistic devices, will be
missing from the usage of non-native speakers.
• We can say then that a reduction in the social function of
a lingua franca results in a reduction in form as well.
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9. Language Interference / Errors
• The effect of the native language can be on any structural aspect of the
second/foreign language: vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation etc.
• Language interference is most often regarded as a source of errors.
• The greater the differences between the speaker’s native language and the
second/foreign language, the more negative the effects of interference are
likely to be (negative transfer).
• But, where the relevant features of both languages are similar or the same,
this will result in correct second/foreign language production (positive
transfer).
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10. How is a lingua franca affected by
linguistic interference?
• Many of the structural characteristics of a lingua franca are
usually the result of linguistic interference.
• Linguistic interference is the effect of the non-native speaker’s first
language on his or her production of the second or foreign
language they are using, which usually results in ‘errors’.
• The technical term for the process by which languages may be
subject, in the usage of non-native speakers, to simplification,
reduction and linguistic interference is pidginization.
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11. What is a pidginization?
• A pidgin language is a lingua franca which has no native
speakers and is used as a means of communication
between people that do not have a language in common.
• It is derived from a ‘normal’ language through
simplification, reduction and interference or admixture,
often, from the native language, or languages, of those
who use it.
• Normally, in the first stages of its development at least, in
which we can refer to it as a pre-pidgin, it is used only in
trading or other limited-contact situations.
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12. An example of a lingua franca is:
Swahili
• Swahili is a language that is widely used as a lingua franca in East Africa.
• On parts of the coast of East Africa, Swahili is the native language of many of the
population, who speak it very fluently.
• Inland, in Tanzania, it is not widely spoken natively, but it is used to a considerable
extent as a lingua franca.
• Compared to the coastal Swahili, this inland lingua franca variety of Swahili
demonstrates some features of simplification, since it is spoken as a second language,
and it is subject to reduction, as it is used in a more restricted set of circumstances
than on the coast.
• Further inland still, in eastern Congo, yet another variety of Swahili is used as a lingua
franca. In this case, even more reduction and simplification have taken place.
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13. Pidgin Swahili
• However, in another part of Congo, in the rural north, a further lingua
franca form of Swahili occurs.
• This variety again is more reduced and simplified, relative to other varieties
of Swahili.
• The result of this degree of reduction and simplification is that mutual
intelligibility with coastal Swahili is minimal.
• When simplification has taken place on a large scale, and when the result is
relatively stabilized form of language consistently employed as a lingua
franca, the resulting variety is called a pidgin language (in this case Congo
pidgin Swahili).
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14. How do pidgins develop?
• The most likely setting for the formation of a pidgin language is a contact situation
involving three or more language groups: one ‘dominant’ language and at least two
‘non-dominant’ languages.
• If contact between the speakers of the dominant language and the speakers of the non
dominant languages is minimal, and the imperfectly learned dominant language is then
used as a lingua franca among the non-dominant groups, a pidgin language might arise.
• Over time, in the speech of lingua franca users, the pre-pidgin will acquire a set of
structures and norms for usage which will be accepted by everybody. It will acquire a
fixed form which linguists can describe and write grammars for.
• Most of the well-known pidgin languages in the world are the result of travel on the
part of European traders and colonizers.
• They are mainly based on languages like English, French and Portuguese, and are
located on the main shipping and trading routes. 14

15. Why have pidgins often been stigmatized?
• Pidgins which have been based on English or other
European languages have often been regarded as bad,
debased, corrupt or inferior forms of these languages.
• This is because many people have objected to pidgins
thinking that they have corrupted the ‘purity’ of these
European languages.
• Views like this are often accompanied by sentiments
about racial and cultural ‘purity’ as well.
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16. English-Based Pidgins
• English-based pidgins were formerly found in North America, the
Caribbean, West Africa, New Zealand and in China.
• They are still found in Australia, West Africa, the Solomon Islands
and in New Guinea, where pidgin English is often referred to by
linguists as Tok Pisin.
• Tok Pisin is probably the most widely spoken pidgin derived from
English.
• Tok Pisin has official status in New Guinea, and is used there on
the radio, in newspapers, and in schools.
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17. From Pidgin to Creole
• World pidgins are at present undergoing a process of creolization.
• Creole languages are pidgins that have acquired native speakers.
• When acquired by children as their first/native language, the pidgin will re-
acquire all the characteristics of a full, non-pidgin language.
• As spoken by adults, the language will have an expanded vocabulary, a
wider range of syntactic structures, and an increased stylistic repertoire,
and will also be used for all purposes in a full range of social situations.
• Creole languages are perfectly normal languages – only their history is
somewhat unusual.
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18. Decreolization
• Creolization repairs the simplification and reduction which
take place during pidginization.
• Decreolization attacks the simplification and admixture
which occurs during pidginization.
• Contact between the base language and a creole language
leads to the gradual introduction into the creole of
structural complexities from the base language, and the
gradual disappearance of elements derived from
languages other than the base.
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19. The ‘Decreolization’ of the African
American Vernacular of English (AAVE)
• Linguists have argued that African American
Vernacular English (AAVE) is descended from an
original creole that has become progressively
decreolized, as a result of centuries of contact with
English, so that it is now clearly a variety of English
itself.
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