{"id":1582,"date":"2011-05-03T10:00:03","date_gmt":"2011-05-03T08:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1582"},"modified":"2011-04-26T08:46:27","modified_gmt":"2011-04-26T06:46:27","slug":"language-contact-new-perspectives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1582","title":{"rendered":"Language contact: New perspectives"},"content":{"rendered":"
Language contact:<\/strong> New perspectives. Ed. by Muriel Norde<\/strong>, Bob de Jonge<\/strong>, and Cornelius Hasselblatt<\/strong>. (IMPACT: Studies in language and society 28.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010. Pp. vii, 225. ISBN 9789027218674<\/a>. $149 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Marc Pierce<\/strong><\/a>, University of Texas at Austin<\/em><\/p>\n

This book contains ten papers addressing various aspects of language contact, as well as a brief introduction by the editors. The individual papers fall into three categories: language contact and migration, language contact in border areas, and language contact \u2018without physical contact with speakers of another language\u2019 (4). For reasons of space, I only discuss one paper from each category.<\/p>\n

There are six papers in the first category. Pieter Muysken<\/strong> reviews two approaches to ethnolects in \u2018Ethnolects as a multidimensional phenomenon\u2019 (7\u201325). They are (i) the \u2018shift perspective\u2019, which focuses on \u2018the approximation in the speech of ethnic groups to the dominant national target language\u2019 (7); and (ii) the \u2018multidimensional perspective\u2019, which also looks at \u2018the original languages of the ethnic group and processes of mutual convergence and simplification\u2019 (7). Muysken argues that these two perspectives are \u2018complementary rather than exclusive\u2019 (23), illustrating his discussion with data drawn largely from the \u2018language use of Moroccan and Turkish young people who actually speak Dutch fluently\u2019 (17).<\/p>\n

Two papers address language contact in border areas. \u2018Detecting contact effects in pronunciation\u2019 (131\u201353), by Wilbert Heeringa<\/strong>, John Nerbonne<\/strong>, and Petya Osenova<\/strong>, explores \u2018language contact effects between Bulgarian dialects\u2026and the languages of the countries bordering Bulgaria\u2019 (131), specifically Macedonian, Serbian, Romanian, Greek, and Turkish. They hypothesize that \u2018pronunciation influences should be strongest as one approaches the border of a country which speaks the putatively influential language\u2019 (131). Interestingly, especially in light of \u2018the large consensus among Balkanists that pronunciation plays a subordinate role in the Sprachbund<\/em>\u2019 (149), they found \u2018clines of increasing similarity\u2019 (148) with regard to Macedonian, Serbian, and Romanian. The results for Greek and Turkish, on the other hand, were negative, which may result from historical and\/or sociolinguistic factors<\/p>\n

The last two papers address language contact without contact between speakers. Jason Shaw<\/strong> and Rahul Balusu<\/strong> discuss \u2018Language contact and phonological contrast: The case of coronal affricates in Japanese loans\u2019 (155\u201380). The focus here is on the pronunciation of [t\u0283i] and [ti] by two generations of speakers with very low conversational proficiency in English. Shaw and Balusu note that there are some generational differences in this regard, and argue that \u2018the first generation of borrowers mapped the foreign phonological contrast to an allophonic distinction in \u2026 Japanese and that the second generation of speakers promoted this weak phonetic distinction to phonemic status\u2019 (155). Their results show that \u2018phonological contrasts can be borrowed\u2026by mature adult speakers even without substantial direct contact with the source language\u2019 (177).<\/p>\n

Other papers in the volume include \u2018Personal pronoun variation in language contact: Estonian in the United States\u2019 (63\u201386) by Piibi-Kai Kivik<\/strong>; \u2018The reflection of historical language contact in present-day Dutch and Swedish\u2019 (103\u201317) by Charlotte Gooskens<\/strong>, Ren\u00e9e van Bezooijen<\/strong>, and Sebastian K\u00fcrschner<\/strong>; and \u2018The impact of German on Schleife Sorbian: The use of gor <\/em>in the Eastern Sorbian border dialect\u2019 (119\u201330) by H\u00e9l\u00e8ne B. Brijnen<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Most of the papers in the volume are quite good, some are first-rate, and the breadth and depth of coverage are both very welcome. A few of the papers do not quite rise to this level, but such papers are definitely in the minority.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Language contact: New perspectives. Ed. by Muriel Norde, Bob de Jonge, and Cornelius Hasselblatt. (IMPACT: Studies in language and society 28.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010. Pp. vii, 225. ISBN 9789027218674. $149 (Hb). Reviewed by Marc Pierce, University of Texas at Austin This book contains ten papers addressing various aspects of language contact, as well as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1582"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1582"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1583,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1582\/revisions\/1583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}