Social and structural aspects of language contact and change

Bettina Migge (ed), Shelome Gooden (ed)

Synopsis

This book brings together papers that discuss social and structural aspects of language contact and language change.

Several papers look at the relevance of historical documents to determine the linguistic nature of early contact varieties, while others investigate the specific processes of contact-induced change that were involved in the emergence and development of these languages. A third set of papers look at how new datasets and greater sensitivity to social issues can help to (re)assess persistent theoretical and empirical questions as well as help to open up new avenues of research. In particular they highlight the heterogeneity of contemporary language practices and attitudes often obscured in sociolinguistic research.

The contributions all focus on language variation and change but investigate it from a variety of disciplinary and empirical perspectives and cover a range of linguistic contexts.

Chapters

  • Social and structural aspects of language contact and change
    Bettina Migge, Shelome Gooden
  • The pith of pidginization
    How Francophones facilitated the simplification of French through Foreigner Talk in the Lesser Antilles
    Peter Bakker
  • African American language and life in the antebellum North
    Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel Church
    John Victor Singler
  • “Suzie & Sambo” (1937–1956)
    What can they tell us today?
    Lise Winer
  • The expression of possibility in the Chabacano creoles and their adstrates
    Marivic Lesho
  • Paradigmatic restructuring
    The case of Northern Indo-Portuguese Creoles
    Clancy Clements
  • Loíza Spanish and the Spanish Creole debate
    A linguistic and sociohistorical account
    Piero Visconte, Sandro Sessarego
  • The value of online corpora for the analysis of variation and change in the Caribbean
    John R. Rickford
  • Apart, and yet a part
    Social class, convergence, and the vowel systems of Columbus African American English and European American English
    David Durian, Melissa Reynard, Jennifer Schumacher
  • Talking about Creole
    Language attitudes and public discourse in the Caribbean
    Susanne Mühleisen
  • Jamaican Creole tense and aspect in contact
    Insights from acquisition and loss
    Trecel Messam, Michele Kennedy

Statistics

Biographies

Bettina Migge

Bettina Migge studied in Hamburg, Yaoundé (Cameroon), Berlin, Columbus, OH and received a PhD in linguistics from the Ohio State University. She worked at the Johann-Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, and is currently professor of linguistics at University College Dublin; she is also a member of the research group Structure et Dynamique des Langues (SeDyL UMR 8202), France. Her research interests lie in the broad areas of language contact, language documentation and sociolinguistics with empirically focus on the Creoles of Suriname and French Guiana and language in Ireland. Her recent publications include articles and book-length studies such as Exploring language in a multilingual context: variation, interaction and ideology in language documentation (with I. Léglise, CUP 2013) and Grammaire du nengee: introduction aux langues aluku, ndjuka et pamaka (with L. Goury, IRD 2017) and edited volumes such as Support, transmission, education and target varieties in the Celtic languages (with N. Ó Murchadha; Routledge, 2017) and Ireland in the European Eye (with G. Holfter; Royal Irish Academy, 2019). She is engaged in a participatory trilingual dictionary project in French Guiana and in other research projects such as the changing patterns of language use among Maroons in French Guiana and language in education in Ireland. She supervises graduate research on world Englishes and linguistic landscaping and is a member of several international scholarly associations such as the COST Action CA19102 ‘Language In The Human-Machine Era’ (LITHME) and the Society for Caribbean Linguistics (SCL) and the Society for Pidgin and Creole Languages (SPCL).

Shelome Gooden

Shelome Gooden is Professor in Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh and is currently Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research for the Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences, and Related Fields. She received a BA in Linguistics from the University of the West Indies (Mona, 1996) and MA and PhD in Linguistics from the Ohio State University (2003).   She is a is a member of the Society of Pidgin and Creole Languages, the Society for Caribbean Linguistics and served on the advisory board for Creative Multilingualism.  Her research focuses mainly on language contact, intonation and prosody in Creole languages and combines sociolinguistic and laboratory phonology methods for collecting fieldwork data. Her peer-reviewed publications include journal articles, edited volumes, edited special issues of top Linguistics journals and articles in prestigious Handbooks. Recent publications include Language Change in Creole Languages: Grammatical and Prosodic Considerations (with C. Clements, Benjamins 2011); In the Fisherman’s Net. Language Contact in a sociolinguistics context (in Blake & Buchstaller 2019); Language ideologies and shifting boundaries: A case study of Yami diphthongs (ay) and (aw), (with L. Lai 2018 Journal of Linguistic Geography).

Book cover

Published

October 17, 2022
LaTeX source on GitHub

Online ISSN

2700-855X

Print ISSN

2700-8541
Cite as
Migge, Bettina & Gooden, Shelome (eds.). 2022. Social and structural aspects of language contact and change. (Contact and Multilingualism 5). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6602539

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Details about the available publication format: PDF

PDF

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-96110-347-8

doi

10.5281/zenodo.6602539

Details about the available publication format: Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-98554-044-0

Physical Dimensions

180mm x 245mm