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This chapter discusses three related contact phenomena: lexical borrowing, mixed (split) languages, and creole formation. They all show the effects of the universal split in languages between the grammatical and lexical features. Lexical borrowing typically affects only lexical elements. In contrast, mixed languages include grammatical elements from more than one language. The Matrix Language Turnover hypothesis explains how mixed languages arise, such as Mednyj Aleut (Copper Island Aleut). Creole formation is marked by an unusual interaction between lexical and grammatical elements: words from one language (the lexifier) become grammatical elements in the developing Creole.

Every Amazonian language has a remarkably rich lexicon, and a plethora of genres with their varied stylistic features, as befits essentially oral cultures. Shamans, with their supernatural powers, have their own distinct way of speaking. Some relatives cannot be spoken to directly—an avoidance style is then required. Elaborate speech formulae are often used to greet, and to farewell. As the modern world with its novel realities encroaches upon the speakers, ways of saying things in Amazonian languages change and adapt. Counting and number words in Amazonian languages stand apart from what speakers of familiar Indo-European languages take for granted. Amazonian languages are relatively poor in underived number words. In many Amazonian societies counting did not used to be a cultural practice. The lexical wealth of Amazonian languages lies in the terms for flora and fauna, and the verbal lexicon. Sadly, as many languages become endangered, these terms pass into oblivion. A number of languages (especially those in the Xingu Indigenous park) have special avoidance styles. Men’s speech is different from women’s speech in Karajá, a Macro‐Jê language, and a few others. Mixed languages include a curios Carib-Arawak Pidgin (now extinct), Media Lengua, and Callahuaya, a language of itinerant healers in Bolivia. New realities of the modern world are ioften expressed through loans, and also through semantic extensions of already existing words.

Accounts of institutions and private individuals between the Norman Conquest and about 1500 were routinely written in a non-random mixture of Medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English. If the base language was Medieval Latin, then only nouns, stems of verbs, and certain semantic fields such as weights and measures could appear in English or French, with all the grammatical material in Latin and English and Anglo-Norman nouns, verbs, and adjectives Latinised by adding a suffix, or an abbreviation sign representing a suffix. If the base language was Anglo-Norman, then only the same restricted semantic fields and nouns and stems of verbs could appear in English. This situation changed over time, but was essentially stable for almost five hundred years. The chapter asks why, if English words could easily be assimilated into a Latin or French matrix by means of suffixes or abbreviations representing suffixes, were all English words not assimilated? Why did letter graphies such as <wr->, <-ck>, <-ght> persist in mixed-language business writing? One effect is to make the text-type of business writing very unlike any other genre—half a glance is all it takes to recognise a mixed-language business document and that may have been an advantage.

The concluding chapter discusses how the conscious creation of specific linguistic forms by speakers contributes to specific forms of deliberate language change, and how language necessarily—because of its relation to power—is polylectal and hence is characterized by the application of varying norms and normative strategies. One central thesis here is that after having understood the principle types, forms, functions, and usage of manipulated languages, we have to reject the discussion of manipulated languages as pidginized languages or creoles. As variation appears to be a principle element of language, manipulation contra a “standard” form needs to be understood as one of the basic features of linguistic praxis.

This book explores how second language (L2) learning might differ from first language (L1) acquisition and whether L2 learning is different from monolingual L1 acquisition if it begins in early childhood, in middle childhood, or in the post-elementary school years. It also examines how two first languages that develop during early childhood (“simultaneous” bilingualism) might differ from monolingual development or from “sequential” bilingualism. L2 grammatical development in older learners is uneven whereas L1 development is uniform, and the book also considers whether this difference might apply to L2 in children. Moreover, the book discusses the general cognitive correlates of bilingualism in children, how conceptual knowledge is available to bilingual learners, how the L1 and L2 subsystems interact, language mixing in child bilingualism, and how metalinguistic abilities associated with school-related language use develops when the child knows two languages.

This chapter identifies the rationale behind this volume: the enduring controversy over how to theorize language-mixing strategies. Relating this controversy to discrepancies in the conceptualization and treatment of the data of language mixing, it outlines a method to distinguish among other-language phenomena based on spontaneous bilingual performance, quantitative analysis, and rigorous standards of proof. It justifies the focus on the three quantitatively predominant manifestations of language mixing: nonce borrowing, lexical retrieval of previously borrowed words and code-switching. It introduces and defines integration, the major tool in characterizing language-mixing types. Ensuing chapters identify and illustrate an array of integration strategies, whereby the vast majority of lone other-language items are adapted to the morphological and syntactic patterns of a recipient language, in a variety of language pairs.

This chapter provides some background on the history of Michif, the language spoken by at least a few hundred Métis people. The Métis were originally located in the Red River Valley, and are today mostly located in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Canada. As Michif is usually characterized as a ‘mixed language’, arising from contact of Plains Cree and French, this chapter discusses ‘contact languages’ more generally, including creoles, pidgins, and mixed languages, as well as the claim that Michif is a ‘mixed language’ itself. This chapter also provides background on the elements within the Michif Determiner Phrase (DP), such as the origin of certain syntactic categories, and presents the basic facts that are investigated in more detail in the rest of the book. Other facts relevant to the issues discussed in the book are also briefly discussed.

This chapter highlights the fact Michif can be described straightforwardly within a generative framework. While it has some features that are the result of contact of two very different systems (two mass/count systems, two plurals, two gender systems), the language behaves nevertheless like other Algonquian languages. Michif has slotted much of the French vocabulary into Plains Cree grammar, with surprisingly few extra French features. Structurally, then, there is no need to posit an entirely new category of ‘mixed’ languages. This chapter also compares discussion on creoles by scholars such as DeGraff (2000, 2003, 2005) and Mufwene (1986, 2001, 2008, 2015) to our discussion of Michif. The terms ‘mixed language’ and ‘creole’ may tell us about the historical genesis of a language, but neither term describes the linguistic behaviour of the languages, and both make ‘exceptionalist’ predictions that are unnecessary and unwarranted.

This chapter reviews the analytical and methodological tenets associated with the variationist perspective on language and outlines its specific applications to the study of language mixing. Key among them are the principled selection of participants and their validation in the community, the primacy of actual bilingual performance data, contextualization of its major manifestations across speakers, mixing strategies (lexical borrowing and code-switching) and language pairs, and systematic quantitative analysis of usage patterns, incorporating checks on the validity and reliability of the results. We explain how the method enables us to address and answer a number of questions that have plagued scholars of language contact for decades.

Analysis of language mixing in the actual production data of bilingual individuals has permitted us to test and overturn many long-standing assumptions about borrowing and code-switching empirically: borrowing is not monolithic but takes many forms in the speech community; it does not originate as code-switching; integration is not gradual but abrupt; speakers tend not to code-switch individual words but to borrow them. This work has also confirmed that code-switching and borrowing are diametrically opposed, not only structurally but from the perspective of the individuals who engage in them. The observable differences between multiword code-switches and lone other-language items, coupled with the overwhelming preponderance of the latter in every bilingual dataset that has been quantitatively analyzed, together demonstrate that any model of language mixing with pretensions to constituting a “unified” theory of language contact phenomena is in fact a theory of lexical borrowing.

This chapter details the difficulties inherent in building corpora pertinent to the process of lexical borrowing, reviews methods for gathering data capable of identifying the grammars giving rise to the various language mixing types, and emphasizes the importance of distinguishing occasional uses from bilingual community trends. It describes the constitution of the bilingual “mega-corpus” which provides the data on which the analyses of many of the ensuing chapters are based, and introduces two other geographically and diachronically related corpora that allow us to track the trajectory of borrowings over time. It presents 11 additional corpora of typologically distinct language pairs whose analysis provides corroborating evidence of many of the claims made on the basis of the larger and more representative corpora.

The reduction of morphological complexity, particularly in inflectional paradigms, is not uncommon in language contact. One area of morphological complexity which has received less attention is variation within the cells of a paradigm, e.g. ‘dived’ and ‘dove’ as different past tense word forms of {DIVE} in English. This type of morphological complexity, where multiple forms are realized in the same cell in a paradigm is termed ‘overabundance’. This chapter examines the development of overabundance in the subject-marking system of Gurindji Kriol, and claims that increasing complexity in this dimension is the result of language contact. We analyse new data from Gurindji children using generalized linear mixed models to determine whether the complexity in the case paradigm has stabilized or whether complexification is on-going. We show that overabundance in Gurindji Kriol is an example of a contact-induced change which involves the complexification of an inflectional paradigm rather than its simplification.

This chapter considers the role of imperial and anti-imperial literatures in the representation and subversion of cultural, linguistic, and racial differences within empires. It discusses the place of poetry in the training of imperial elites in parts of the ancient and medieval world, the representation of barbarianism in imperial and anti-imperial literatures, and the importance of an idea of “classical” texts in imperial perceptions. The second half of the chapter discusses how the multilingualism of empires created linguistic choices for writers. By bringing together cultures, languages, and literatures, empires produced distinctive cosmopolitanisms which straddled the colonial-nationalist divide in the modern era and led to the authoring of texts that were simultaneously nationalist and cosmopolitan. While empires were politically and economically oppressive, they also made available a range of literary traditions, aesthetic possibilities, and creative opportunities for authors and poets (both imperial and colonized) to work with.

This chapter explores the origins of Eskayan vocabulary. Eskayan morphosyntax is strongly modeled on the grammar of Visayan, the principal language of Bohol. At the same time, its vocabulary bears only a minor Visayan influence, suggesting full-scale relexification. Spanish has had a more marked influence on Eskayan vocabulary in terms of phonotactics, root length, and a small number of direct borrowings. A small proportion of Eskayan lexemes are modeled on English counterpart terms. The traces of these colonial languages lend important clues to the development of the lexicon as a whole, shedding light on the tumultuous historical context in which Eskayan came into being. Further, the patterning of Eskayan vocabulary reveals Pinay’s folk-linguistic conceptions about the nature of language and linguistic variation.