On the Flathead Reservation in northwestern Montana, the sixty
remaining fluent speakers of Montana Salish, most of them elderly,
speak their language only to each other, changing to English when
outsiders or younger tribal members are present. The Aleuts who
used to live on Bering Island off the east coast of Russia speak
Russian in addition to their native Aleut. The Republic of
Singapore, an island nation of just 238 square miles, boasts four
official languages. Language contact is everywhere: no nation has a
completely monolingual citizenry and many have more than one
official language.
Sarah G. Thomason documents the linguistic consequences of
language contacts worldwide. Surveying situations in which language
contact arises, she focuses on what happens to the languages
themselves: sometimes nothing, sometimes the incorporation of new
words, sometimes the spread of new sounds and sentence structures
across many languages and wide swathes of territory. She outlines
the origins and results of contact-induced language change, extreme
language mixture -- which can produce pidgins, creoles, and
bilingual mixed languages -- and language death. The book concludes
with a brief survey of language endangerment.
Complete with lists of additional readings and references as
well as a glossary for students new to the subject, this textbook
is a richly documented introduction to a lively, fast-developing
field.
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