Language Contact and Sociolinguistics

Creolisation and creoles

Creolisation is the process by which a pidgin, a restricted contact language with little or no grammar, is expanded in structure and function until it becomes a fully developed language. Pidginisation and creolisation run in opposite directions: pidginisation reduces grammatical rules and vocabulary, while creolisation elaborates them again once the language is stabilised. A stabilised pidgin becomes a creole when children acquire it as their first language, a step called nativisation, because the children expand its rules into a complete grammar. A creole therefore has an elaborated and systematic grammar, while its lexicon is comparatively restricted, so the pattern is not the reverse of this. For example, a trade pidgin with few tense markers and a small set of words may, in a community where children grow up speaking it, develop full tense and aspect systems and a richer grammatical structure.

Prescriptive vs descriptive grammar

Prescriptive rules state how a language should be used and set norms for standard written and formal usage in spelling, grammar and vocabulary. Because they are normative, they fix a standard and tend to resist change rather than record it. Descriptive grammar, by contrast, records what speakers actually do, including regional and social variation and changes in spoken language, without judging them as right or wrong. Universal grammar and inter-dialectal variation are the concern of descriptive study rather than of prescription. Many popular beliefs about language are myths, meaning claims not supported by linguistic evidence. All natural languages can express complex ideas, so the claim that some languages are primitive is a myth. Slang, texting, swearing and colloquial usage introduce variation and change, which are normal in living languages, so they do not degrade a language or its grammar. By contrast, linguists hold that writing is a secondary technology, so the presence or absence of a script does not make a language more or less capable. Grammar textbooks prescribe norms of usage as their stated purpose, which is a description of their function rather than a myth.

Language families of India

The languages of India belong to four major families: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman. Indo-Aryan is by far the largest family in number of languages, and it includes Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Sanskrit and Urdu. Dravidian includes Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tulu, and Austroasiatic includes the Munda languages such as Santali and Mundari together with Khasi. Tibeto-Burman includes Bodo and Manipuri and many other languages of the northeast. When counting languages in a list by family, one first identifies the members of the smaller families and then assigns the rest to the largest one. For example, if a list of 24 languages contains 2 Austroasiatic, 5 Dravidian and 2 Tibeto-Burman languages, the Indo-Aryan count is 24 - 2 - 5 - 2 = 15. Lexical tone, in which pitch distinguishes word meaning, is not found in most Indian languages. It occurs in some Tibeto-Burman languages such as Ao of Nagaland, and Punjabi has developed tone. Assamese, Nepali, Kashmiri, Dogri, Mundari, Ho and Toda are non-tonal.

South Asian linguistic area features

A linguistic area is a region in which languages from different genetic families converge on shared structural features through long contact, regardless of their historical relationship. South Asia is the classic example, and several features are found across the Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda families. Compound verbs, built from a main verb and a light verb such as take or give, are widespread in the region. Retroflex consonants occur across the major families, and non-nominative subjects, such as dative or oblique subjects, are also a common South Asian pattern. Agglutination, by contrast, is typical of Dravidian and Munda languages but not of the largely fusional Indo-Aryan branch, so it cannot be counted as a feature shared by most of the region.

Singular they

Singular 'they' is the use of the plural pronoun 'they' with a single antecedent. Its main motivation is to avoid the sex-specific pronouns 'he' and 'she', which can be inappropriate when the sex of the referent is not relevant to the message. Gendered pronouns can also lead listeners and readers to draw gendered interpretations that the speaker did not intend, and singular 'they' avoids such readings. The motivation is therefore one of pronoun choice and social appropriateness, not a claim that English as a whole is sexist. Example: 'Each applicant should bring their certificate to the office.' The form is accepted in standard usage today as a neutral singular pronoun.

Tok Pisin phonological adaptation

Tok Pisin is an English-lexified creole of Papua New Guinea, and when it borrows English words it adapts their sounds to its own phonological system. The most important constraint is that Tok Pisin permits only single consonants in the onset, so English onset clusters are broken up. One repair strategy is vowel epenthesis, in which an extra vowel is inserted between consonants, creating an additional syllable nucleus and thereby giving the word a more open CV structure. The other strategy is deletion, in which one consonant of the cluster is dropped. Another process found in the adaptation of English words is fortition, the change of a fricative into a stop, so that an English labiodental fricative may surface as a voiceless bilabial stop. Final consonants are not systematically deleted, since codas are often retained in borrowed words, so the claim that codas are obligatorily null is not correct for Tok Pisin.

Anti-language and social varieties

In sociolinguistics, the term anti-language, introduced by Halliday, refers to a language developed by a small social group that stands in opposition to mainstream society. Examples include criminal groups and other marginalised communities. Its vocabulary is used to maintain group identity and secrecy, so that outsiders cannot easily understand the talk of the group. Other varieties are not anti-languages even if they are restricted to a particular group. Academic jargon used by specialists, legal register used in courts, and child-directed speech used by caregivers are social or functional varieties, and they are not defined by opposition to the dominant society.

Language policy and minority language education

When a minority language that is already spoken by a sizeable population is to be introduced as a medium of instruction, language planning must address both its status and its form. Status planning gives the language an official or educational function, so that it can be used in schools and public life. Corpus planning develops the vocabulary, terminology and orthography needed for the language to express school subjects such as science and mathematics. Language revival is a process for restoring a language that has ceased to be spoken, and language preservation is the maintenance of a language that is already in use. Neither is a necessary step when the language is already spoken by a large community and is simply being extended into education.