The main aim of this study is to examine what kind of phonological system emerges because of language contact wherein adult speakers of L1 (Chinese) attempt to speak L2 (Russian) without any previous instruction in L2. The main findings of this study are as follows: a) The speakers of L1 largely adopt the phonetic inventory and phonotactics of L2 and b) the only underlying (distinctive) features in

This study focuses on the issue of language proficiency attainment among young heritage speakers of Russian living in Spain and examines factors that have been claimed to promote heritage language proficiency, namely, age, gender, age of onset to L2, quantity of exposure and family language use. A group of 30 Russian-Spanish-Catalan trilingual children aged 7–11 participated in the study. In order

In this article, we present a qualitative and quantitative comparative account of Final Vowel Loss (fvl) in the Bantu languages of the Lower Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We argue that this diachronic sound shift rose relatively late in Bantu language history as a contact-induced change and affected adjacent West-Coastal and Central-Western Bantu languages belonging to different

Following study of small-inventory classifier systems in a number of Indo-European, Turkic, Kartvelian and Semitic languages of the Araxes-Iran Linguistic Area, the paper presents an account of numeral classifiers in Udi, a Nakh-Daghestanian (Lezgic) language spoken in northern Azerbaijan. Being a peripheral member of the linguistic area in question, Udi possesses an even more reduced version of a

Within recent years, quantitative cross-linguistic research has shown that body parts are one of the least borrowed semantic fields (Tadmor and Haspelmath, ; ; ). With body parts showing many similarities to closed classes, it is simple to assume there is little motivation for a language to borrow body part terms into its lexicon. Yet, despite its lower percentage of borrowings cross-linguistically

Based on the existence of some structural conflict between Spanish and Catalan in certain points of the syntax, this study tests the hypothesis about the influence of the latter on the distribution of queísmo uses (‘Me alegro que vengas’ [‘I’m glad you come’]) in the Spanish spoken in an eastern peninsular variety in contact with Catalan. Using the tools of comparative sociolinguistics, and the analysis

The paper provides the first description of the borrowing of Croatian collective numerals into Northern Istro-Romanian and explores the consequences of this borrowing for the morphosyntax of the recipient language. It argues that the collective numerals under examination, which are specified as nominative plural feminine in the Slavic model, took on a different structural specification in the Romance

In this paper, I deal with verb borrowing in a language-contact situation involving Greek as target and Romance and Turkish as source languages. More particularly, I discuss the reasons and techniques that make verbs of typologically and genetically different languages to be accommodated in a uniform way within the same linguistic system, and verbs of the same donor to be integrated in a different

The fate of two languages in the Balkans under conditions of language contact is discussed here. These languages, representing different branches of the Romance family, are the Ibero-Romance language Judezmo from the eastern branch and the South Danubian language Aromanian from the western branch. Both have been subject to intense contact with other languages in the Balkans but they show differential

It is not disputed that Slavonic languages have influenced the inflexional morphology of Romanian and its closely related Daco-Romance varieties. For example, Romanian vocatives in -o, Istro-Romanian perfective verb-roots, and probably the Megleno-Romanian first and second person singular endings -um and -iʃ, are all attributable to Slavonic. These cases generally involve loans of ‘morpheme’-like entities

The languages of the Balkans are a rich source of data on contact-induced language change. The result of a centuries long process of lexical and structural convergence has been referred to as a ‘sprachbund’. While widely applied, this notion has, however, increasingly been questioned with respect to its usefulness. Addressing the linguistic makeup of the Balkan languages, the notion of sprachbund is

This chapter deals with contact-induced change in Italo-Albanian and its effects on the Balkan inheritance of this minority language. The introduction is dedicated to the general characteristics of Albanian and its varieties from a historical, dialectological and geographic perspective, followed by a section on the historical and present situation of the Italo-Albanians. While Section discusses the

The aim of this article is to investigate a special case of suppletion in the paradigm of the negative imperative in some dialects of southern Calabria. First, we show how these paradigms involve the extension of an original infinitival desinence to a present indicative verb, giving rise to a hybrid imperatival form (Section ). Second, we claim that this pattern of suppletion does not represent a Romance-internal

As is well-known, code-mixing is particularly frequent at clause boundaries and with elements expressing pragmatic meaning. However, most of the literature has focussed on switching of simple elements such as conjunctions and discourse markers. This paper, in contrast, analyses clause peripheral switching involving two complex constructions: left dislocations and pseudo-clefts. The data are from English-Spanish

The English verb-particle construction or phrasal verb (pv) has undergone dramatic semantic extensions from the expression of literal motion events (the ball rolled down the hill) – a pattern known as satellite-framing – to idiomatic figurative uses (the company will roll out a new plan) where selection of the particle is motivated by Conceptual Metaphors. Over the course of its long contact with English

It is well established that L2 acquisition is faster when the L2 is more closely related to the learner’s L1. In the current study we investigated whether language similarity has a comparable facilitative effect in early simultaneous bilingual children. The similarity between each bilingual child’s two languages was determined using phonological and typological scales. We compared the vocabulary size

This article compares the monolingual Basque predicative constructions with bilingual Basque-Spanish predicative constructions. The speech data for the study were collected in the Greater Bilbao area of the Basque Country between 2005 and 2012. The results suggest that code-switching may trigger the convergence of predicative constructions and have a significant impact on the general word order patterns

This work applies computational tools that have been used to model loanwords in newspaper corpora to an analysis of a loan translation in an oral bilingual corpus. The explicit goal of the contribution is to argue that a specific collocation found in a corpus of Spanish spoken in Texas, agarrar+NP (e.g., agarrar ayuda), is a loan translation that is calqued on English get+np support verb constructions

This article explores the role of usage frequency in the structure of language mixing by the application of corpus-linguistic and statistical methods. The goal of the study is to reveal that the frequency of a lexical item and the frequency with which it occurs with other items account for its use in bilingual speech. To achieve this goal, I analyze German monolingual and German-Russian mixed adjective-modified

Previous studies view the use of Guarani grammatical morphemes in Paraguayan Spanish simply as grammatical borrowings (if one focuses on the morphosyntactic status of mixed forms) or as an ill-defined “interference”. But so far there has been no examination of the bilingual planning mechanisms that license and constrain these language mixes. In this paper, I explore the idea that the emergence of grammatical

The influence of usage frequency, and particularly of linguistic similarity on human linguistic behavior and linguistic change in situations of language contact are well documented in contact linguistics literature. However, a theoretical framework capable of unifying the various explanations, which are usually couched in either structuralist, sociolinguistic, or psycholinguistic parlance, is still

The article focuses on two markers of progressive aspect that are emerging in a Balkan Slavic dialect in Albania, presumably under Albanian influence. One of them dates back to locative (ǵe ‘where’). Two processes intertwine on the grammaticalisation path of the other (toko): originally an adversative conjunction (‘but’), it was structurally mapped to its polysemic (adversative, but also affirmative

In a variety of Brazilian Portuguese in contact with Veneto, variable vowel reduction in clitic position can be partially accounted for by the phonotactic profile of clitic structures. We show that, when phonotactic profile is controlled for, vowel reduction is statistically more frequent in non-pronominal than in pronominal clitics, which indicates that these clitic types are represented in separate

In this article, I analyse the phonological adaptation of Anglicisms in three languages (French, German and Czech) from a contrastive perspective. The classification of standard phonological forms, based on a system of eight adaptation principles, aims at capturing the degree of phonological permeability/resistance for each of the languages. Phonological approximation (the substitution of foreign phonemes

Deuber (2006) investigated variation in spoken Nigerian Pidgin data by educated speakers and found no evidence for a continuum of lects between Nigerian Pidgin and English. Many speakers, however, speak both languages, and both are in close contact with each other, which keeps the question of the nature of their relationship on the agenda. This paper investigates 67 conversations in Nigerian English

The aim of this paper is to investigate two Francoprovençal speaking communities in the Italian region of Apulia, Faeto and Celle di St. Vito. Despite the regional neighborhood of the two towns, and their common isolation from other Francoprovençal speaking communities, their sociolinguistic conditions are deeply different. They differ in reference to the functional distribution of the languages of

The debate as to whether syntax can be borrowed has spurred much scholarly inquiry among those who argue that syntax cannot be borrowed () and those in favor of the ‘anything-goes’ argument (Thomason, 2001). In contribution to this debate, this study examines the contact-induced processes behind the variation of Basque Differential Object Marking (dom). We examine the use of Basque dom in the spontaneous

The aim of this paper is to provide an explanation of the emergence of dom in peripheral Macedonian dialects through a reevaluation of the contact hypothesis. The southern and south-western dialects in the contact zones with Greek and Aromanian use a dative-based pattern to mark specific, predominantly human and animate referents. However, the contact hypothesis cannot fully explain the origin of dom

This paper focuses on the Arborense Differential Object Marking (dom) system, which in line with the typical Sardinian dom system marks the object noun phrases characterized by a high degree of animacy and specificity with the preposition a. This is why the Sardinian dom is also called prepositional accusative. Authors dealing with other Sardinian dialects agree in identifying three domains of distribution

This paper is a comparison of nine Arawakan languages sharing a rare phenomenon in the Americas: differential subject marking. We argue that the languages involved display a group of predicates with oblique case marking on the subject, similar to the subject-like obliques in Icelandic and Hindi. Comparison with bivalent constructions provides a strong argument for the diachronic process of objects

The present paper explores Differential Object Marking in a variety of Asturian (Western Iberian Romance) spoken in western Asturias (northwestern Spain). This ancestral form of speech stands out from Central Asturian and especially from Standard Spanish. For a number of reasons, ranging from profound changes in pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology and information structure to slight but very relevant

In Cappadocian and Pharasiot, the two main members of the inner Asia Minor Greek dialect group, the head nouns of NPs found in certain syntactic positions are marked with the accusative if the relevant NPs are definite and with the nominative if the NPs are indefinite. This differential case marking (DCM) pattern contrasts with all other Modern Greek dialects, in which the accusative is uniformly used

The present paper provides first insights into emblematic language use in Bunia Swahili, a variety of the Bantu language Swahili as spoken in and around the city of Bunia inIturi Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Structural variability in Bunia Swahili shows that this language variety consists of basilectal, mesolectal and acrolectal registers, which are used by speakers to express different

This paper discusses the historical borrowing of an enclitic across unrelated Papuan languages spoken along the lower Sogeram River in the Middle Ramu region of present-day Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. The enclitic *=a, which attached to the right edge of a prosodic unit, was borrowed from the Ramu family into the ancestor of three modern Sogeram languages. Both morphological and prosodic substance

This article aims to test the general validity of borrowability scales by investigating contrastively two contact induced linguistic varieties of Greek. It tries to elucidate the factors that facilitate or inhibit the borrowability of free grammatical elements, which are usually considered as less amenable to transfer. It argues against the formulation of any borrowability scales of a generalized predictive

This paper examines the influence of language contact and multilingualism on the encoding of transfer events in the heritage variety of Javanese spoken in Suriname. Alongside Javanese, this community also speaks Sranantongo and Dutch, of which Sranantongo had the longest contact history with Javanese. It is shown that this long period of contact had a structural influence on the expression of transfer

Structuralists and generativists have insisted for a long time that the elements and structures one language could borrow from another are constrained by typological compatibility, naturalness, and other factors (cf. Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 13–34). Such constraints are still thought to apply to structural interference, or pattern replication in the terms of Matras and Sakel (2007), and the often

The northwestern part of the island of New Guinea has been the site of intense contact between a hugely diverse set of languages. Languages from at least nine nonAustronesian families (plus several isolates) are spoken alongside Austronesian languages from the South Halmahera-West New Guinea branch, which arrived in the region roughly 3500 years ago. This paper looks at lexical items in the semantic

Amongst the problems of contact grammaticalisation research in past studies has been, first, the problem of searching for diachronic evidence in relatively 'new' language situations, something which was advocated by Bruyn (2009), amongst others as essential to contact grammaticalisation research. Because of the absence of stage-by-stage diachronic evidence for contact grammaticalisation, many cases

In this article, I examine the intrusion of the Spanish preposition de into the languages of Mexico. Following Matras and Sakel (2007), I apply the distinction of matter (mat) and pattern (pat). The exploration of the 35 Archivo de lenguas indígenas de México publications which serve as a comparable database shows that Chontal, Mexicanero, Nahuatl de Acaxochitlán, Otomi, Yucatec, Zoque, and Zapotec

After decades of debate in linguistic theory, the lexical/functional status of adpositions is still controversial. Lexicon-Grammar mixed languages such as Media Lengua, spoken in Northern Ecuador, are excellent testing cases for such grammatical categories: This mixed language displays a conservative Quichua morphosyntactic frame while approximately 90% of its lexical roots are relexified from Spanish

In this article, I reconsider the evidence for a Central Andean linguistic area. I suggest that there is no evidence for a clear-cut linguistic area comprising the entire Central Andes narrowly defined, and that perceived homogeneity is partially due to an overemphasis on the largest and surviving Central Andean language families, Quechuan and Aymaran. I show that none of the other Central Andean languages

The purpose of this article is to study the linguistic evidence of Slavic-Albanian language contact in the kinship terminology of the Mrkovići, a Muslim Slavic-speaking group in southern Montenegro, and to demonstrate how it refers to the social context and the kind of contact situation. The material for this study was collected during fieldwork conducted from 2012 to 2015 in the villages of the Mrkovići

This study examines the language of the Druze community in Israel as going through the process of convergence and a composite Matrix Language formation, resulting in a split language, a.k.a. mixed language, based on Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language turnover hypothesis (2002). Longitudinal data of Palestinian Arabic/Israeli Hebrew codeswitching from the Israeli Druze community collected in 2000 and 2017

The aim of this paper is to examine contact-induced changes, visible on lexical and lexico-syntactical levels, in the set of twenty sixteenth-century petitions in Nahuatl from the region of Santiago de Guatemala. They comprise such phenomena as the creation and usage of neologisms, extentions of meaning, the adoption of loans in the morphological system of Nahuatl and the usage of calques. The material

This paper discusses historical and ongoing morphological simplification in Alorese, an Austronesian language spoken in eastern Indonesia. From comparative evidence, it is clear that Alorese lost almost all of its morphology over several hundred years as a consequence of language contact (Klamer, 2012, to appear). By providing both linguistic and cultural-historical evidence, this paper shows that

This paper explores borrowing of nouns between two unrelated Australian languages with a long history of contact: Mudburra, a language with no grammatical gender, and Jingulu, which has four genders and super-classing. Unusually, this case involves extensive borrowing in both directions, resulting in the languages sharing 65% of their nouns. This bi-directional borrowing of nouns allows us to simultaneously