Contacts between different language speakers.

Contacts between people speaking different languages typically lead the participants to find ways to overcome barriers to communication by means of some compromise (Winford, 2003). The need for communication compromises have been modified by the considerable borrowing from the English language as it has dominated the world in recent times as the ubiquitous medium of communication. In many cases borrowing is insignificant and amount to a few words that seem to express more precisely what the native speaker wishes to convey. Utilizing English or other dominant languages can also reflect the prestige of possessing more worldly values and is associated with status that is not conveyed by using the less dominant language.

Languages are shaped either by borrowing from other groups or by imposition of the dominant language on minorities as for example when English replaced native Celt languages (Van Coetsem, 2000). As we can observe in regard to the spread of the English language lexical change or vocabulary are easily changed and used in less dominant languages, however the speaker still uses the grammar of his native tongue. Structural features like grammar are more resistant to change in cross- language contacts leading often to very peculiar expressions. However, in contacts where one language is clearly dominant, for example in the context of colonialism, imposition may also affect the grammar of the recipient’s language (Winford, 2005).

Those of us who have learned more than one language benefit by metalinguistic awareness defined as the increasing consciousness of features of our own language about which we were previously unaware. A second language also increases our ability to learn additional future new languages (Jessner, 1999). This increased language acquisition is facilitated by the common features within families of languages. For example, knowing English, German and or Danish, makes it possible for the speaker to see the considerable overlap in the Dutch language. According to Jessner, metalinguistic thinking is a higher level of cognition since we are not thinking just about what the language conveys, but rather about the language symbols themselves and the ways we are representing information in language. Contacts enable us to incorporate the information represented by seeing the common overlap, but also the distinctions between the two or more languages.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 809