Variation Due to Language Contact

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M.A. ENGLISH, PART–I, SEM–II ENGLISH LANGUAGE TODAY VARIATION DUE TO LANGUAGE CONTACT INTRODUCTION Language contact occurs when two or more languages or varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. Multilingualism has likely been common throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual. In tribal hunter-gatherer societies, multilingualism was common, as tribes must communicate with neighboring peoples and there is often intermarriage. In present-day areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa, where there is much variation in language over short distances, it is usual for anyone who has dealings outside their own town or village to know two or more languages. When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Languages normally develop by gradually accumulating dialectal differences until two dialects cease to be mutually intelligible, somewhat analogous to the species barrier in biology. Language contact can occur at language borders between ad stratum languages, or as the result of migration, with an intrusive language acting as either a super stratum or a substratum. Language contact occurs in a variety of phenomena, including language convergence, borrowing, and relexification. The most common products are pidgins, creoles, code-switching, and mixed languages. DIFFERENT VARIETIES 1. Varieties according to subject matter These varieties are sometimes referred to as registers. Though, this term is applied to different types of linguists. We play a number of roles in a number of context and thus we have to select such variety of language that is typically relevant to the situation in which we are operating. We can range from short talk to baby talk, from abstract, linguistic, lectures to kitchen gossip etc. newspaper
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