Language Contact In The Early Colonial Pacific

This volume presents a historical-sociolinguistic description and analysis of Maritime Polynesian Pidgin. It offers linguistic and sociohistorical substantiation for a regional Eastern Polynesian-based pidgin, and challenges conventional Eurocentric assumptions about early colonial contact in the eastern Pacific by arguing that Maritime Polynesian Pidgin preceded the introduction of Pidgin English by as much as a century. Emanuel J. Drechsel not only opens up new methodological avenues for historical-sociolinguistic research in Oceania by a combination of philology and ethnohistory, but also gives greater recognition to Pacific Islanders in early contact between cultures. Students and researchers working on language contact, language typology, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics will want to read this book. It redefines our understanding of how Europeans and Americans interacted with Pacific Islanders in eastern Polynesia during early encounters and offers an alternative model of language contact.

This volume presents a historical-sociolinguistic description and analysis of Maritime Polynesian Pidgin. It offers linguistic and sociohistorical substantiation for a regional Eastern Polynesian-based pidgin, and challenges conventional Eurocentric assumptions about early colonial contact in the eastern Pacific by arguing that Maritime Polynesian Pidgin preceded the introduction of Pidgin English by as much as a century. Emanuel J. Drechsel not only opens up new methodological avenues for historical-sociolinguistic research in Oceania by a combination of philology and ethnohistory, but also gives greater recognition to Pacific Islanders in early contact between cultures. Students and researchers working on language contact, language typology, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics will want to read this book. It redefines our understanding of how Europeans and Americans interacted with Pacific Islanders in eastern Polynesia during early encounters and offers an alternative model of language contact.

This volume presents a historical-sociolinguistic description and analysis of Maritime Polynesian Pidgin. It offers linguistic and sociohistorical substantiation for a regional Eastern Polynesian-based pidgin, and challenges conventional Eurocentric assumptions about early colonial contact in the eastern Pacific by arguing that Maritime Polynesian Pidgin preceded the introduction of Pidgin English by as much as a century. Emanuel J. Drechsel not only opens up new methodological avenues for historical-sociolinguistic research in Oceania by a combination of philology and ethnohistory, but also gives greater recognition to Pacific Islanders in early contact between cultures. Students and researchers working on language contact, language typology, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics will want to read this book. It redefines our understanding of how Europeans and Americans interacted with Pacific Islanders in Eastern Polynesia during early encounters and offers an alternative model of language contact.

The second edition of the definitive reference on contact studies and linguistic change—provides extensive new research and original case studies Language contact is a dynamic area of contemporary linguistic research that studies how language changes when speakers of different languages interact. Accessibly structured into three sections, The Handbook of Language Contact explores the role of contact studies within the field of linguistics, the value of contact studies for language change research, and the relevance of language contact for sociolinguistics. This authoritative volume presents original findings and fresh research directions from an international team of prominent experts. Thirty-seven specially-commissioned chapters cover a broad range of topics and case studies of contact from around the world. Now in its second edition, this valuable reference has been extensively updated with new chapters on topics including globalization, language acquisition, creolization, code-switching, and genetic classification. Fresh case studies examine Romance, Indo-European, African, Mayan, and many other languages in both the past and the present. Addressing the major issues in the field of language contact studies, this volume: Includes a representative sample of individual studies which re-evaluate the role of language contact in the broader context of language and society Offers 23 new chapters written by leading scholars Examines language contact in different societies, including many in Africa and Asia Provides a cross-section of case studies drawing on languages across the world The Handbook of Language Contact, Second Edition is an indispensable resource for researchers, scholars, and students involved in language contact, language variation and change, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and language theory.

Contact has always been a normal part of the development of languages, from those of ancient empires, those of colonial expansion, and to those of our globalizing planet today. Pidgin and creole studies have merged with the study of other language contact phenomena (adult second-language acquisition, bilingualism, bilingual mixed languages, language shift, partially restructured languages, language attrition, etc.) to form the flourishing field of contact linguistics. This new Routledge Major Work brings together the most important contributions advancing our understanding of language contact phenomena. Its five volumes cover almost two hundred years of scholarship and provide researchers and students with an overview of how insights about the new languages that emerged as a result of European expansion to Africa, Asia, the New World and the Pacific have led to a clearer view of what language is. Beginning fitfully in the mid-nineteenth century and then gathering momentum after 1960, the field of pidgin and creole linguistics has developed from a marginal field associated with the stigma of the languages it studied to a subfield which is now at the centre of linguistic enquiry.

For review see: Peter Bakker, in New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, vol. 70, no. 1 & 2 (1996); p. 190-192.

The Pacific is historically an area of enormous linguistic diversity, where talk figures as a central component of social life. Pacific communities also represent diverse contact zones, where between indigenous and introduced institutions and ideas; between local actors and outsiders; and involving different lingua franca, colonial, and local language varieties. Contact between colonial and post-colonial governments, religious institutions, and indigenous communities has spurred profound social change, irrevocably transforming linguistic ideologies and practices. Drawing on ethnographic and linguistic analyses, this edited volume examines situations of intertwined linguistic and cultural change unfolding in specific Pacific locations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Its overarching concern is with the multiple ways that processes of historical change have shaped and been shaped by linguistic ideologies reflexive sensibilities about languages and language useheld by Pacific peoples and other agents of change. The essays demonstrate that language and linguistic practices are linked to changing consciousness of self and community through notions of agency, morality, affect, authority, and authenticity. In times of cultural contact, communities often experience language change at an accelerated rate. This is particularly so in small-scale communities where innovations and continuity routinely depend on the imagination, creativity, and charisma of fewer individuals. The essays in this volume provide evidence of this potential and a record of their voices, as they document new types of local actors, e.g., pastors, Bible translators, teachers, political activists, spirit mediums, and tour guides, some of whom introduce, innovate, legitimate, or resist new ideas and ways to express them through language. Drawing on and transforming metalinguistic concepts, local actors (re)shape language, reproducing and changing the communicative economy. In the process, they cultivate new cultural conceptions of language, for example, as a medium for communicating religious knowledge and political authority, and for constructing social boundaries and transforming relationships of domination.

This book contributes to a more balanced view of the most dramatic results of language contact by presenting linguistic and historical sketches of lesser-known contact languages. The twelve case studies offer eloquent testimony against the still common view that all contact languages are pidgins and creoles with maximally simple and essentially identical grammars. They show that some contact languages are neither pidgins nor creoles, and that even pidgins and creoles can display considerable structural diversity and structural complexity; they also show that two-language contact situations can give rise to pidgins, especially when access to a target language is withheld by its speakers. The chapters are arranged according to language type: three focus on pidgins (Hiri Motu, by Tom Dutton; Pidgin Delaware, by Ives Goddard; and Ndyuka-Trio Pidgin, by George L. Huttar and Frank J. Velantie), two on creoles (Kituba, by Salikoko S. Mufwene, and Sango, by Helma Pasch), one on a set of pidgins and creoles (Arabic-based contact languages, by Jonathan Owens), one on the question of early pidginization and/or creolization in Swahili (by Derek Nurse), and five on bilingual mixed languages (Michif, by Peter Bakker and Robert A. Papen; Media Lengua and Callahuaya, both by Pieter Muysken; and Mednyj Aleut and Ma'a, both by Sarah Thomason). The authors' collective goal is to help offset the traditional emphasis, within contact-language studies, on pidgins and creoles that arose as an immediate result of contact with Europeans, starting in the Age of Exploration. The accumulation of case studies on a wide diversity of languages is needed to create a body of knowledge substantial enough to support robust generalizations about the nature and development of all types of contact language.