Chapter VI, Part 1
1.
The whole range of
communicative events activating more than one language can be termed interlingual
discourse. At one end of the range is ‘nonce borrowing’, where an
individual text producer occasionally throws in just a foreign word or two
without following or setting any precedent. At the other end is the fully
stabilized ‘creole’, where a whole community uses a language system that was
originally derived by mixing two or more languages. In between lies an extensive
gradation of personal and social combinations. Here again is a widespread
practice where theory has lagged far behind. For a °mainstream linguistics
studying each language by itself° as ‘a system wherein everything holds
everything else in place’ (II.44), interlingual discourse would seem merely
‘unsystematic’. In contrast, our own conception of °discourse being an
actual system
° could be expanded for discourse
that draws upon more than one °virtual system
of
language° while °interfacing them with multicultural cognitive and social
constraints°.
2.
Interlingual discourse also raises the troublesome issue of how to distinguish
between language versus dialect. Following upon the philological study of
dialects (II.16f, 21), early linguists were perplexed by the prospect that
‘language’ and ‘dialect’ might be ‘purely relative terms’ (Sapir).
Somewhat deviously, they argued that the ‘geographical diversity’ among
dialects is really ‘temporal diversity’ affecting a single language (Saussure)
and could thus be excluded from the °synchronic perspective outside of time°.
Dialects could only be produced by the break-up of a single genuine language:
‘all languages that are known to be genetically related’ would be merely
‘divergent forms of a single prototype’ (Sapir). This general formulation by
no means accounts for the available evidence over extended periods of historical
change, e.g. when different languages grow more similar instead of less so. Nor
does it indicate why and how such a break-up might occur and what could result
when the dialects remain in contact, even when they have become different
‘languages’ by the usual criteria. The chief missing link here, as in any
linguistics of °language by itself°, is precisely interlingual discourse,
which must be the main social practice for navigating evolution toward either
unity or diversity. There, real speakers easily overstep the tidy boundaries
that linguistics would prefer to draw around the individual language or dialect.
3.
Understandably, interlingual discourse also raises problems about sources
of evidence. Indirect evidence
might be gleaned by comparing and contrasting languages, and inquiring whether
and how they may at one time have been used by the same groups in the same
discourse. Here, we can seldom draw firm conclusions, because various factors
may be influencing the data: language evolution, historical relatedness,
migrations, language contacts, social status, colonialism, or just the frozen
accidents occurring independently in several languages. We can seldom isolate a
single factor that enabled a given feature or pattern to spread from one
language into another. More direct
evidence can be found when items clearly belonging to different languages
are observed appearing together. Here, we can record some useful data and
consult the participants as informants. Yet the motives or reasons for the
phenomena may still be complex. Items or patterns may have entered
unintentionally by interference, intentionally by borrowing, or spontaneously by
code-switching. Much work remains to be done for theory to catch up with
practice.
4.
Research on more than one language can either compare
them by foregrounding their similarities
or else contrast them by foregrounding
their differences. Comparing was
naturally the central project of the domain of comparative
philology, which helped to prepare the foundations for the science of
linguistics (II.16-20). Ingenious methods were developed to uncover subtle
similarities among languages and to determine whether a common ancestry or
history might be involved. Languages with rich points of comparison were widely
held to be members of the same language
family, e.g., the Slavic languages. The notion that ‘language developed
but once in the history of the human race’ (Sapir) has had an ancient tradition and has recently
resurged in studies of ‘monogenesis’ (cited for II.19).
5.
Yet assuming that all languages descended from just one might make it harder to
explain the origin of languages as an event requiring special or even unique
conditions, and still more so to explain the vast and diverse processes of evolution
and change for creating the stunning diversity among all the known
languages in the world. If, as suggested above, °natural language° emerged by
‘externalizing’ the already ‘amplified’ internal languages of human
life-systems (III.106ff), several scenarios are open: (a) the origin occurred
only once, and the species that developed it survived the others; (b) the origin
occurred more than once, but only one species survived; (c) the origin occurred
more than once, each time giving rise to the ancestor of one language family
that evolved down into historical times. Though we have scant evidence for
deciding which scenario actually occurred, the question is highly significant
for theories of language change and evolution. Scenarios (a) and (b) imply much
more radical processes for change than does (c); and (b) raises the salient
question of which language type could favor survival of the species over other
types.
6.
A geographical and social source of evolution and change has been explored under
the term languages in contact. This is a common practical situation, most
pronounced after individuals or groups have migrated from their home localities,
e.g., to engage in commerce or warfare. Whether one culture chose either to
segregate itself from another or else to integrate with it, languages would
occupy a primary role as the most elaborated signifiers of cultural identity.
According to the Christian Bible, for
example, the word ‘shibboleth’ (‘ear of grain’ in Hebrew) served to
segregate the conquering people of Gilead from the defeated people of Ephraim,
who pronounced it ‘sibboleth’ (cf. Book
of Judges 12: 4-6). Even today, when language contacts have been vastly
intensified by regional mobility and multiculturalism, the presence of people
speaking an unfamiliar language can cause irritation or discomfort and foster an
impulse to be separated. Such feelings are avidly exploited by the militant
monoculturalism portrayed in VII.B, leading to a host of confrontations in
everyday life and work.
7.
To be an effective cause of language change, language contacts would need to
influence a substantial group of speakers and their discoursal practices. The
effects should be strongest when widespread discourse regularly exposes speakers
to multiple influences. Unfortunately, such discourse leaves behind little
historical evidence or documentation, especially among languages that have
disappeared or have not developed writing systems. Most written texts from
earlier historical periods belonged to °prestigious text types° (II.3ff),
whose producers might have considered it quite inappropriate to mix languages.
On the contrary, most °language guardians° regard the mixing of languages with
amusement, ridicule, or downright alarm, witness their snobbish disrespect for
pidgins and creoles (cf. VI.50, 52).
8.
The prospective role of language contacts as a cause of language change thus
remains in dispute. Sometimes we have considerable evidence for the influence of
one language upon the evolution of another, e.g., when English was overlaid by
Norman French as a language of administration from the 11th century onward, or
when ‘ancientist’ (‘classical’) French of the 17th century was expressly
modeled on literary Latin. But even then it’s hard to determine why such an
influence had the specific effects it did. The evidence is most straightforward
for lexical borrowing, e.g., when English borrowed French names of
certain animals to designate their edible meat, whence the present-day
resemblance of ‘beef’ to ‘boeuf’, ‘veal’ to ‘veau’, ‘mutton’
to ‘mouton’, and ‘pork’ to ‘porc’ (cf. III.124; VII.152). Who
actually did the borrowing and how it came to be accepted by the language
community is usually not recorded; all we see are the attestations. Nor do we
have adequate samplings of transitional discourses where the changes are still
in the process of becoming accepted.
9.
Our gravest problem is to determine how language contact and interlingual
discourse might contribute to sweeping changes of an entire
subsystem, such as phonology, morphology, or grammar. Grammatical
borrowing is far harder to explain than lexical. The evidence is most secure
when a variety of a language differs from the more ‘standard’ variety
precisely in ways that make it more similar to the languages it contacts. In the
village of Kupwar in southern India, four languages have been spoken for some
400 years: the Indo-Iranian languages Urdu and Marathi and the unrelated
Dravidian languages Kannadu and Telugu. The long contact is probably why the
local varieties of these languages show some conspicuous formal similarities.
Whereas in standard Urdu the two Genders are mainly grammatical but conceptual
for animate beings, Kupwar Urdu resembles Kannada in reserving Feminine for
female humans only, while non-human animates are all Masculine. Conversely,
Kupwar Kannada resembles Urdu in having an expression for Representive ‘be’
in patterns like ‘Noun + “is” + Noun’, while standard Kannada has none.
10. Such
interlingual contacts should best exert their effects when the languages are
rather similar, e.g., the ‘tone languages’ of Southeast Asia like
Vietnamese, Thai, and regional varieties of Chinese. But, due to the °non-deterministic
nature of self-organization°, we cannot predict just which changes will
actually appear or just how much interlingual discourse will be needed to set
them in motion and see them through. Even with intense language contacts, it’s
not clear why speakers would consciously borrow formal features or patterns or
why other speakers with lesser contacts would decide to imitate them.
Presumably, most changes occur gradually and without conscious effort or
consent; yet the long-range effects of the changes can attain remarkable
proportions. Mbugu (or Ma’a), a non-Bantu language spoken in and around
Usambara in Tanzania, seems to have borrowed its complex Nominal and Verbal
morphology wholesale from the Bantu family, even though most of its Nominal and
Verbal Stems as well as all Pro-Nouns resemble those of the Cushitic languages
usually assigned to the Hamito-Semitic family. Such a shift could scarcely occur
without long-range interlingual discourse among substantial groups of speakers
— and even so it baffles explanation. Similar contacts would be needed if the
Slavic languages, in contrast to their unaffected Baltic relatives, changed
their Vowel systems through contact with Finno-Ugric speakers, as Herbert Galton
suggests.
11.
In formal linguistics, comparing
languages has been less influential than contrasting
them. Fieldwork made important progress by describing remote languages whose
organization contrasted dramatically with the familiar Center languages, and by
attaining a heightened sensitivity for possible modes of organization (cf.
II.31ff, 37, 84ff, 109). Later on, research was inaugurated under such explicit
headings as contrastive linguistics
and interlinguistics for examining
how languages differ. One well-known contrast between English and German, mainly
expounded by Günther Rohdenburg, is the tendency of English to format
Circumstances as Agents, e.g., ‘the theatre seats 1200 people’ (sample [81]
in IV.50), which would not occur in German, e.g., ‘*das Theater setzt 1.200
Menschen’. Such work can have important applications to interlingual discourse
in domains like language learning or translation (VI.14).
12.
The preference for
contrastive over comparative reflects the °formalist leanings of mainstream
linguistics°: viewing languages as formal systems accentuates their differences
and erases cultural memory for historical contacts. The similarities gain
prominence when we view languages as functional systems whose °lexicogrammars
interact with cognitive and social constraints°. For example, several European
languages like German and Spanish hold a view of Agent and Initiative that
favors Reflexives for a wide range of Actions such as Enactives like sitting
down or lying down or Emotives like getting mad or being happy, whereas English
favors Medials wherein the Agent is the Medium of the Action (cf. IV.49, 105)
— even though German and Spanish are less closely related than are German and
English. If, as Michael Halliday says, ‘the grammar of every natural language
is (among other things) a theory of human experiences’, then shared
experiences on the European continent might be expected to encourage similar
designs, including peculiarities in formal details, e.g., Reflexives even for
Actions that hardly seem self-directed, as in Spanish ‘míreselo!’ and
German ‘schau dir das an!’ (versus English ‘look at that!’).
13.
Conversely,
lexicogrammars might differ to accommodate divergent views of human experience.
For Ruqaiya Hasan, everyday spoken Urdu
contrasts
with English by deploying ‘implicit devices’ whereby Participants in a
Process need not be made explicit in discourse, because they are clear in the
context of situation and are taken for granted within the culture (VII.69); for
example, we see a higher proportion of unmarked ellipsis of the Clause Subject
than we find in English (cf. IV.195).
Or, for Jim Martin, Tagalog
has
three main control centers for organizing its grammar: family, i.e., doing things together or sharing things; face,
i.e., keeping up appearances and respecting other people’s status; and fate,
i.e., events beyond the individual’s control; he contrasts these with the
corresponding English control centers of individuality,
reality, and determinism. Such tendencies recall the much-discussed ‘principle
of linguistic relativity’, holding that ‘language is a guide to “social
reality”’ to the degree that ‘the “real world” is to a large extent
built upon the language habits of the group’ (Sapir); and that ‘the
structure of a human being’s language influences the manner in which he
understands reality and behaves with respect to it’ (Whorf). In the framework
of this book, we might prefer to say that language,
cognition, and social reality dialectically design each other, though the
effects may vary widely in their directness, timing, consistency, thoroughness,
and so on. We can expect to witness some dramatic effects as non-Western
cultures at the Periphery, such as in the Philippines, get relentlessly °Westernized
in the name of the economic growth° that mainly benefits the multinational
corporations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and so on. The
Center sends out ‘culture’ and draws in wealth (cf. VIII.33, 54ff).
14.
Contrasts between
lexicogrammars are also the concern of comparative
stylistics, which explores the characteristic distributions of unmarked
choices in two or more language systems. Incidental examples are easy to find,
e.g., the unmarked tag-like follow-up ‘ouviu?’ in spoken Brazilian
Portuguese where the English follow-up ‘did you hear me?’ would be marked as
impatient or authoritarian. But comprehensive surveys are hard to find. One
classic work is Jean Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet’s study of French and
English. Toward the lexical end of the lexicogrammar, the study noticed
‘lexical modulation’ in how events and their participants are typically
organized. A term may focus on Agent plus main Target in English versus on Agent
plus enabling Target in French (e.g., ‘fireman’ versus ‘pompier’, an
operator of water pumps); or on the Action versus the enablement (e.g., ‘air
lift’ versus ‘pont aérien’, aerial bridge); or on the Action versus the
Circumstance (e.g., ‘a first-run movie’ versus ‘un film en exclusivité’).
But we also find terms where French focuses more on the Action than does English
(e.g., ‘bouteille isolante’ [isolating bottle] versus ‘vacuum bottle’,
or ‘papier peint’ [painted paper] versus ‘wall paper’). Toward the
grammatical end, the study noticed different patterns of ellipsis (cf. IV.186)
with French being more inclined to retain Substitutes (in the sense of IV.187-95),
e.g.: ‘il pourrai le savoir’ versus ‘he might know’; ‘essayez de
m’en empêcher’ versus ‘try and stop me’; ‘il est satisfait mais je ne
le suis pas’ versus ‘he is satisfied but I am not’. Yet here too, the
reverse also occurs, e.g., ‘finissez!’ versus ‘stop it!’, or ‘j’ai
du mal á croire que…’ versus ‘I find it hard to believe that…’. Such
comparisons again raise the interesting but difficult prospect of stating some
sparse but consistent functional correlations between pairs of languages, such
as would be extremely useful for teaching the language and for training
translators (VI.12). We would need a deal of checking against the large
multi-language data corpuses recently becoming available, such as the trilingual
English-French-Spanish corpus at the University of Lancaster.
15.
More specific
comparisons might be drawn for particular styles, such as a ‘poetic’ style
in French versus a ‘poetic’ style in English. Yet our general statements
might still be fairly sparse; richer ones would need to address the more
specific ‘poetic’ styles of historical periods, ‘schools’, or even
individual poets. We might thus compare the influential style developed by
Charles Baudelaire for 19th-century French poetry with the style of various
English versions, e.g., a stanza from his sonnet ‘Recueillement’ [647]:
[647]
Pendant que des mortels la
multitude vile
while that
of-the mortals the multitude vile
Sous le
fouet du
Plaisir, ce
bourreau sans
merci,
under the whip of-the pleasure, that executioner
without mercy
Va cueillir des
remords dans la fête
servile (1866)
goes to-gather of-the remorse
in the
festival servile
[647a] While the multitude of
mortals under the whip of Pleasure, that merciless executioner, go to gather
remorse in the servile festival
[647b] Now while the heedless
throng makes haste to press
Where pleasure drives them,
ruthless charioteer,
To pluck the fruits of sick remorse
and fear (Alfred Douglas, 1919)
[647c] Now while the common
multitude strips bare,
feels pleasure’s cat o’ nine
tails on its back,
and fights off anguish at the great
bazaar (Robert Lowell, 1961)
[647d] Now while the rotten herds
of mankind,
Flogged by pleasure, that lyncher
without touch,
Go picking remorse in their filthy
holidays (Robert Bly, 1961)
[647e] While mortal multitudes with
vile intents
By ruthless hangman Pleasure are whipped hence
To cull remorse in servile revelments (RdB, 1997)
[647b-d],
all written by (reputed) English poets, join in differing starkly from the ‘prose
style’ of [647a], provided as a ‘literal translation’ by an anthology
editor (X.J. Kennedy, who is a reputed poet too). But they also diverge starkly in
their approaches to style: Douglas seeking the most ornate style (e.g.,
‘heedless throng’, ‘ruthless charioteer’), Lowell a lesser one (e.g.,
‘common multitude’, ‘great bazaar’) and Bly a defiantly anti-poetic one
(‘rotten herds’, ‘lyncher’, ‘filthy holidays’) and even abandoning
meter for prose rhythm. Only my own version [647e] seeks to reconstruct a style
parallel to Baudelaire’s, partly by using cognate lexical items like
‘mortal’, ‘multitudes’, ‘vile’, and ‘servile’ or French-seeming
items like ‘revelments’, and partly by retaining his metaphors, which the
three poets freely transformed. His ‘bourreau’ in [647], which suggests a
state-sponsored executioner but equipped with a whip (‘fouet’) like a
torturer, becomes a ‘charioteer’ [647b] (has a different profession but
still uses a whip) or a ‘lyncher’ [647d] (executes with a rope and
illegally), or just disappears [647c] (being the implied Agent using the ‘cat
o’ nine tails’, a special whip). Such transformations can lead to
incongruous collocations. If ‘fruit-pluckers’ were indeed ‘driven’ by a
‘charioteer’, they would presumably be riding inside and not running along
under the whip in front. ‘Stripping bare’ would be done prior to a whipping,
but is a peculiar Action at a ‘great bazaar’. A ‘lyncher’ would not hang
a ‘herd’ of animals like cattle, who would already be dead anyway if they
were ‘rotten’. Admittedly, we are now getting into the special problems of
translation as well as comparative stylistics, and will take a closer look in
VI.D.
16.
If we examine
interlingual discourse from the perspective of its participants, we encounter
the issues of bilinguism or multilinguism, defined here not just as knowledge of more than one language but also as discourse
practice in more than one. Although these phenomena are now more common
worldwide than monolinguism is, most linguistic theoreticians, as Roy Harris and
Alastair Pennycook note, still treat monolinguism as the norm. One type, called
‘coordinate bilinguism’, might have two systems stored fairly
independently of each other, so that when one is activated the other is not.
Another type, called ‘compound
bilinguism’, might have the two systems stored in close correlation, so
that both get activated together. Empirical evidence has been found for both
types, raising the question of what conditions might favor the one over the
other. The recently proposed °construction-integration model°, reviewed in
III.250-56 and indicating that initial memory access is non-selective, makes the
compound type more plausible. Also, this type would gain efficien
cy by using shared entries
(concepts, topics, schemas, etc.) in the total network of °knowledge about
world and society° to support both languages; but we would need to account for
the skillful sorting operations that keep bilingual speakers from continually
manifesting interference, i.e., the
activation of one system being impeded by control from another (cf. VI.21-30)
and generating quasi-automatic lexicogrammatical mixtures, perhaps through the
process of spreading activation cited in III.232 and III.246. I have observed in
my own usage that I am most likely to switch languages unintentionally just
after saying lexical items, especially long or complex ones, that are not
clearly associated with the language I am speaking just then, such as a proper
names (IV.23). Such anecdotal evidence suggests that going briefly outside one
language system is a prime occasion for involuntary shifts to another system;
the danger is much lower while staying inside one system.
17.
We should also consider
the respective design of the two languages a bilingual speaker knows. If the two
designs differ strongly, more total data have to be stored but the risks are
lower for interference, e.g., English and Chinese. If the two designs are quite
similar, the reverse should hold: more compact data storage but also more
interference, e.g., French and Spanish (after driving from Spain to France, I
once groggily gave the silly time of day 2:30 as ‘deux heures et midi’,
thinking of Spanish ‘dos y media’). These risks may be complicated by
borrowings between otherwise dissimilar languages, witness Italian ‘capire’
versus German slang ‘kapieren’ (‘umderstand’), where you should be wary
of saying ‘kapieren Sie?’ rather than ‘verstehen Sie?’ to
officials like Austrian police or customs officers at the border.
18.
Evidently, similarities
between languages in contact can raise efficien
cy for text reception but lower it
for text production. So an optimal design for bilinguism might be to have
‘compound’ reception and ‘co-ordinate’ production. But the routine
interaction between reception and production should render this design difficult
to achieve, at least without special training and intensive practice, as for
simultaneous translating (cf. VI.21, 64, 74ff). My own competence certainly
isn’t designed this way: after a week or two in Portugal or Brazil, my spoken
Spanish degrades into the interlanguage known as ‘portunhol’.
19.
Interlingual discourse
can also promote the development of non-native
language varieties, such as the varieties of English that have become
entrenched in Africa and Asia where the ‘British Empire’ once was. After
long being denied institutional recognition, some of these are finally being
documented by the International Corpus of English directed until very recently
by the late Sidney Greenbaum at University College London and slated to gather a
million words of authentic texts in the local varieties of English in England,
the U.S., Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, India, Singapore, Hong Kong,
Philippines, Cameroon, Caribbean/Jamaica, Kenya/Tanzania/Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and
South Africa. Such varieties are most obviously affected by local conditions in
their lexicon, either by establishing otherwise unusual English collocations
like ‘Himalayan blunder’ in Indian English, or by borrowing items from local
languages like ‘otak udang’ (‘prawn-brain’ for a person acting stupid)
taken from Malay into Singapore English (cf. VI.35; VII.344). The effects on
prosody and grammar are more diffuse and subtle. Where British speakers might
say an Exclamation with a prosody like
that
shown in Fig. VI.1a, with a brisk rise and fall, I observed Singaporean students
to say the one shown in Fig. VI.1b with the low opening syllable(s) leading into
a sustained up-and-down curve toward the end of each tone group. The Singaporean
stress patterns have probably been affected by the local languages: Malay,
Tamil, and varieties of Chinese, chiefly Hokkien, Teochow, Cantonese, Hainanese,
Hakka, and most recently Mandarin.
20.
The grammar of Singapore
English also reveals some interesting discourse signals. A prominent one is the
multi-functional particle written ‘la’ or ‘lah’, which has been claimed
to come from Chinese (compare the particle ‘le’ in Mandarin for signalling
that ‘a state of affairs has special current relevance with respect to some
particular situation’), and, among other things, is placed at the end of an
utterance to signal of Certainty for commitment or emphasis, as in two samples I
observed, [648] (carpenter) and [649] (student):
[648] I give it to you for
nothing, lah
[649] I can’t help it, lah
The
universal tag-question ‘is it?’ is
used irrespective of the Person of the Verb Phrase upon which its depends, e.g.
[650] (from a student-written musical) where a British speaker would prefer
[650a]. Plausibly, this item was encouraged by invariant question particles in
Chinese (‘ma’ in Mandarin) and Malay (‘kah’). A British speaker might
mistakenly feel patronized, as if someone said ‘is that it?’ to suggest you
have been devious or unclear.
[650] So we are feeling sorry now,
is it? (from a student-authored musical)
[650a] So we are feeling sorry now,
are we?
Although
such features of local varieties have been loudly condemned by °language
guardians with a colonialist ideology°
(cf.
VI.50, 52, 60), they are far from disappearing in ordinary discourse.
21.
In the phenomenon of interference, mentioned in VI.16, the activation of one language
system is observably impeded by control from another. This phenomenon contrasts
with total bilinguism or multilinguism, wherein each system is successfully used
on its own terms; probably, most people fall short of this ideal totality and
encounter occasional interference, especially if the languages involved are
rather similar (cf. VI.17f). Special training may also be helpful, especially
for simultaneous translators (cf. VI.74ff).
22.
If we view language as
an abstract formal system (II.24, 47), interference appears to be mere noise;
but if we view discourse as a concrete actual system
, interference can offer helpful
clues about discourse processing, e.g., about the °activation of concepts and
expressions° (cf. III.248-55). Like speech errors, slips of the tongue, and
miscues, interference might be a side-product of the routine efficiency gained from °self-organizing
patterns of local activations°; the leading question would be how multilingual
speakers can speak without
interference (cf. VI.16). If one concept is closely connected to expressions in
two languages, its °activation should briefly prime them both during text
production°, and further operations could select the needed one and inhibit the
other. If such operations run like those used for a single language to °construct
and regulate active networks through parallel distributed processing°, suitable
controls would need to inhibit the ‘wrong’ expressions from the non-selected
language despite their meanings being relevant to the discourse topic (cf.
III.246ff). A wrong item that is more closely connected to the concept in the
speaker’s memory might win out over the right item and get passed along into
production or at least get carried along and mixed with the right item, as when
a German chap speaking English told us he had once been a ‘tellerdisher’ in
a hotel (German ‘Tellerwäscher’ + English ‘dishwasher’).
23.
An alternative account
could be that activation does not work just with items,
but with the whole subsector of the lexicogrammar for the current discourse domain,
say, the set of items for the discourse of geometry in English. The discourse
would be supported by some general but mild activation for the whole subsector
in the selected language, but not for the corresponding subsector in the
non-selected language. This mild activation could bias individual selections and
reduce the competition between English versus non-English items. When an item
occurs that is not clearly associated with the selected language, we might see
the involuntary switching to a non-selected language (noted in VI.16) if, at
that moment, the subsector bias is briefly deactivated.
24.
Any such operations for
inhibiting interference would be sensitive to the speaker’s fluency
in the selected language. The etymology of this term would counsel using
‘fluency’ for a ‘flow’ of speaking with a suitable ‘pacing’ in the
sense of III.204. Yet the term is often used instead for speech judged to
manifest ‘correct’ grammar and pronunciation (cf. VII.324, 337). The two
uses do not converge too well nor do they yield clear criteria. On the one side,
pacing can reflect other factors besides your knowledge of the language, e.g.,
anxiety or concentrated attention in a dangerous situation such as an oral
examination; and pacing can vary among different varieties of language, witness
the smoothness and rapidity of Indian English
, as contrasted with British
English (VII.344). On the other side, ‘correctness’ is notoriously
disputatious even among native speakers of English, simply because many choices
among options are not specified by a frozen grammar but by ongoing emergent
constraints (cf. VII.330).
25.
The concept of fluency
needs to be further specified for types of speakers and situations. For
monolingual speakers, ‘fluency’ would designate a pacing that is not just
smooth and rapid but appropriate
to
the situation, e.g., slowing down for unfamiliar or difficult content or for an
audience of non-specialists (cf. V.94ff). The standards would also be the
appropriate
ones
for the participants, and not just the ones prescribed by ‘grammar books’ or
manuals of ‘elegant usage’. For multilingual speakers, fluency would
designate a maintenance of appropriate
controls
within each language; pacing would be balanced against standards, so that speech
would be no faster than can be achieved without disruptive interference or degradation.
26.
In this way, fluency
could be realistically assessed relative to the speaker’s current knowledge of
a language. It could be adjusted to accommodate the trade-off between speed
versus accuracy (III.213.10) that is most acute in the early stages of
non-native language instruction. It could also overcome the traditional tactic
to uphold standards and suppress interference by drastically restricting the
range of expression to a handful of prefabricated utterances (VII.324); the
result is a seemingly fluent but wholly artificial ‘pseudo-discourse’, which
tends to alienate the participants and to dilute their interest and motivation.
The unconventional alternative would be to accept interference in early stages
in order to build upon the native-language fluency as stipulated by a workable
model of how discourse can strategically exploit control borrowed from a
non-selected language. The model would need to specify the design for a series
of provisional interlanguages to support real communication and to progress
gradually but reliably from the native language to the foreign language
(VII.336ff).
27.
It would be vital here
to distinguish whether interference actually disrupts communication or else is
offset by °constraints from the participants’ knowledge of world and society°.
Some interference may seem merely marked, e.g., florid [651] (native speaker of
English), or quaint [652] (Russian). Moreover, the intended content is usually inferable
from the situation, e.g., [653] (Arabic, notice in a Cairo hostel computer room)
and [654] (Spanish, letter to me after a congress where my paper was read by the
co-author). Interference is more damaging if comprehension would require some
knowledge of the speaker’s native language, e.g., [655] (German) and [656-57]
(Portuguese). The worst interference comes from translating ‘word for word’
with a bilingual dictionary, e.g., [658] (sign in a Spanish airplane) or [659]
(notice in a hotel in Alicante or Alacant). English tourists can get the message
of [659] by knowing the ‘payment’ such establishments prefer within the
‘politics of property and rent’ in modern Western cultures. Still, such
extreme cases interference are rare in real discourse because even moderate
fluency in a second language warns you not to rely on bit-for-bit matching
alone. Instead, most of these cases are deliberately devised for marked or
humorous
effects,
e.g., [660] to cheer up my friend when we were stuck on a boat in windy weather
and forced to go below deck, or [661] to vent my resentment on pompous, doltish
German politicians like Helmut Kohl with their asinine English by caricaturing
what they might say on a state visit to England.
[651] wir sind außer Speise
geraten [= we ran out of food]
[652] I cannot tolerate your
patience any longer [end of lecture]
[653] This lab is strictly allowed
[= reserved] for the Hostel Residents. Please declare [= show] your ID card.
[654] I regretted you to be there
[= I missed your being there]
[655] Because they are often
‘raunzig’ [i.e. grouchy], the Viennese have a bad call [= Ruf, i.e.
reputation] in western Austria.
[656] finish water [= acabou agua,
i.e., we’re out of water, not a command to finish off the water]
[657] close the light [= fecha a
luz, i.e., turn off the light]
[658] in case of emergency pull the
handle and discard [= arroje, i.e. push out
[659] In regime
from house rent of apartment,
the payment is for anticipated.
[= En regimen de alquilar
de apartamentos, el pago es por adelantado,
i.e., rent regulations require that apartments be paid in advance]
[660] self me
pulls it all too very
[= selbst mir zieht es allzu
sehr, i.e., it’s too draughty even for me]
[661] I herewith vomit
this stretch
to-the intercourse.
[= hiermit
übergebe ich diese Strecke
dem Verkehr,
i.e., hereby
turn over I
this roadway to traffic’
Admittedly,
few interlingual jokes could top the grotesque comedy of nepotism, greed, and
incompetence played out by the Kohl regime itself, where, as is typical of
right- right-wing conservative governments, party loyalty and personal gain rank
far above aptitude or intelligence (VII.47, 51).
28.
The familiar cases of
interference are the more local and formal ones affecting occasional Words or Phrases. Less familiar are
the more global and functional
cases affecting such factors as the organization of Processes and Participants
or the distribution of focus. Viewed in a ‘functional sentence perspective’,
English maps the pattern with the °Theme of content that is known, expected, or
easily inferred, and the Rheme of content that is not° (IV.214ff) onto the
patterns of ‘Subject + Predicate’, whereas Mandarin Chinese can follow
Thematic priorities more closely. We notice some of the resulting interference
when sample [662] was translated by a native speaker of English into [662a].
[662.1] Miss Xie is a graduate
student from China. [662.2] Now she is studying American
literature
in the Department of English. [662.3] She likes American literature very much
and has read a lot about the subject. [662.4] Some professors and students of
the University know her.
[662a.1] Xié Xiàojié
shí cong Zhōngguó lái
de yánjiū-shēng.
[662b.4] Tā
Xie Miss be
from China
come mod
graduate student 3sng
xián zái Yīngwén Xì
lī
xué
Měiguó wénxué.
[662a.3] Tā hěn
xǐhuān
now loc English
Department in study America literature
3sng very like
Měiguó
wénxué hé
dú guò
hěnduō kèběn
guānyú zhè yī
kè.
America literature
also read perf
many textbook
about this
one subject
[662a.4] Zái dáxué
lǐ yǒuxiē
jiàoshòu rènshi tā.
loc university
in some professor know
sng
‘Xié
Xiàojié’ is the Theme of [662.1] and is properly taken up by the
co-referring Third-Person Singular (3SNG) Pro-Noun ‘tā’ at the start of
the [662.2] and [662.3]. But the Phrase ‘guānyú zhé yī kè’ in
[662.3], being Thematic, should go before the Verb and before the more Rhematic
‘hěnduō kèběn’. Interference from the prototypical English
Subject-Predicate format was most glaring when [662.4] had the highly Thematic
‘tā’ after ‘yǒuxiē
jiàoshòu’, Agents not
mentioned before (though expected for a university); the student may have felt
that putting the pronoun at the start would be as marked in Chinese as the
English fronting ‘her some professors know’.
29.
Conversely, this Chinese
text [663] (from A Brief Introduction to
Education in Shanxi) was translated by native Chinese speakers into
the English text [663a]:
[663.1]
Xīn Zhōngguó
chénglì yǐhóu Dǎng hé
zhèngfǔ
shífēn zhòngshí
New China
found after
party and government very
emphasize
jiáoyú
shīyé. [663.2] Jǐnguǎn zái
shí nián ‘Wénhuà Dà Gémìng’
zhōng
education cause though
loc
ten year culture big revolution
in
Shānxī
hé quán
guó yīyàng,
jiàoyù shíyè
de fāzhǎn
Shanxi and whole country same
education cause poss development
shòudào yànzhòng
pòhuài.
suffer
severe
sabotage
[663a.1]
Since the founding of New China, the Party and state have paid great attention
to the development of education. [663a.2] Like other places in China, Shanxi
suffered from the serious sabotage of the ten-year upheaval of the cultural
revolution (1966-76) in education.
[663b.1] Since the founding of the
People’s Republic of China, the Communist Party and the state have devoted
great attention to the development of education. [663b.2] However, this
development suffered serious sabotage in Shanxi, as elsewhere in China, during
the ten-year upheaval of the Great Cultural Revolution (1966-76).
In
[663a], some cultural discrepancies are conspicuous, e.g., Westerners might need
to be informed that ‘New China’ and ‘the Party’ are ‘the People’s
Republic of China’ and ‘the Communist Party’. Less conspicuous is the
uncertain handling of Theme and Rheme. The opening in [663a.1] takes ‘the
founding of New China’ for the background and puts ‘great attention to
education’ in the foreground. The first stretch of [663a.2] leads the reader
to expect a confirmation, e.g., ‘Like other places in China, this attention
promoted education in Shanxi’. But a contradiction is stated instead in
‘serious sabotage’, while ‘education’ gets pushed along to the very end
of the sentence, as if ‘education’ had been the domain where the ‘cultural
revolution’ took place. I would propose to use the unmarked English sequence
whereby the Rheme of one Sentence becomes the Theme of the next, hence the
recurrence ‘development’ - ‘development’ [663b.1-2], making it
unnecessary to repeat ‘education’; end-weight focus can go to the Rhematic
‘sabotage’ and its cause. A junctive like ‘However’ can set up the
contrast of [663b.2] against what [663b.1] leads you to expect.
30.
Instead of just
deploring or punishing interference, we should explore its sources as a natural
side-product of the capacity of discourse processing to °integrate
multiple constraints without explicit
controls°. The constraints of a non-selected language in which the speaker
is also fluent can easily intrude. We might obtain some valuable evidence both
about the gradual evolution of discourse skills while learning a second language
and about the rapid evolution of current versions of language during discourse
(cf. III.128-36). For example, interference might prove to fluctuate according
to ongoing resource demands, increasing under competition from stress, noise,
and fast timing, or decreasing with support from motor precision, attention, or
feedback. If so, we can design models for language learning under conditions
that help learners to control interference without severe anxiety and to
steadily phase it out later on (cf. III.336f).
31.
Unlike interference, borrowing deliberately appropriates specific items from another
language and frames them into its own organization during communication. In nonce
borrowing, an individual text producer makes an isolated appropriation from
the °framed language°, usually because a comparable term in the °framing
language° either is not available and needs explaining [664] (native speaker of
Lithuanian) or else would seem marked [665] (German, where Noun and Verb do not
coincide as in English ‘mail’).
[664] Also worth a try are gira
(a refreshing beverage made by fermenting grains of fruit […] But beware of samagonas, a powerful and often nasty-tasting home brew of cheap
wine!
[665] wir haben dir schon etwas ge-e-mail-t
[= we already sent you some e-mail]
32.
Communal
borrowings are accepted by a whole
community. These are frequent among immigrants who are not schooled in foreign
languages and retain their native language in their new environment. The popular
play Bordynkari (from English
‘boarders’), adapted by Jaroslav Psenka (1908) from a novel of the same name
by František Škaloud (1898), portrays a Czech community in Chicago using
English words they have largely adapted to their native sounds, spelling, and
grammar, e.g., ‘bajbaj’ from ‘bye-bye’, ‘pedlak’ from ‘peddler’,
and ‘departmentní obchod’ from ‘department store’. Czech supplied the
framework of the utterances, e.g. in [666] and [667], the latter with the
Sentence Subject getting focused end weight in contrast to the English version.
[666] jak to bude s tím
čenčem za ten dolar?
[what about the change for my dollar?]
[667] pracovali tam plumbari
a papírovaši [plumbers and paperhangers worked there]
When
borrowings are selected for prestige
, the original pronunciation and
orthography are most likely to be preserved, as in the German uses of English
‘down’ (for mood), ‘high’ (for altered awareness), and ‘easy’ (for
feeling at ease). But prolonged ordinary use favors assimilation to the framing
language, e.g., English ‘orangutan’ (pronounced to rhyme with ‘I rang and
rang’) from Malay ‘orang hutan’ (‘person [of] forest’), or Malay
‘bas sekolah’ from English ‘school bus’. Eventually, such items are no
longer regarded as borrowings at all and are barely noticed in discourse;
certainly nobody considers Malaysia’s national ‘Parlimen’ undignified
because its name is not spelled or pronounced like English ‘parliament’.
33.
Code-switching
is a far more extensive and less deliberate interface, where speakers (and much
less often, writers) episodically switch between the framing and the framed
language. Even when the proportion of the framed language is quite high, the
framing language, usually the speaker’s more fluent one, is recognized by
providing the patterns. In general, it provides the units matching the morphemes
and syntagmemes, and the Function Words for grammaticalizing, while the framed
language is limited to episodic lexicalizing of Content Words, especially ones
not used in the discourse as Adjuncts to expressions in the framing language.
These tendencies endow code-switching with some regular emergent constraints
despite its frequently improvised quality. We can see some evidence in
recordings of Chinese students in the U.S. collected by Longxing Wei, where the
observed data could not be changed as shown: the English items are Cores with
Adjuncts (e.g. ‘my advisor’)
rather than Adjuncts of Chinese Cores (e.g. ‘*my
dǎoshī’)
[667], and the groups are kept together rather than interrupted [668]. More
deliberate nonce-like switching can be done to achieve marked affects, such as
the striking or humorous graffiti popular in German-speaking cities like Vienna
[669-70].
[668] qù jiàn my advisor tā zuìjìn
very busy
vs. *qù jiàn my dǎoshī
tā zuìjìn very máng [go
see my advisor, lately he’s very busy]
[669] business building qián yǒu parking
lot vs. *qián business building yǒu
parking lot [in front of business
building there’s a parking lot]
[670] No Atomstrom in my Wohnhome
[no nuclear power in my residence hall <=
German ‘Wohnheim’]
[671] Mehr power to the Bauer, mehr
Recht for the Knecht [more power for farmers, more rights for laborers]
34.
As suggested by the
Czech and Chinese examples, the leading motive for code-switching is a
multilingual setting, e.g., in displaced cultures of recent or ethnically
distinctive immigrants or in former colonies like the Philippines (cf. VI.84;
VIII.33ff). A less pervasive but still significant motive would be educational
and professional institutions in which certain technical subjects are taught or
discussed in non-native languages such as English. There, many switched-to items
are technical terms, e.g. geology in [672] and medicine [673-74], recorded by
Ibrahim Khidhir Sallo at the University of Mosul, Iraq. For [673], he suggested
that the lecturer might also be switching to English to ‘avoid socially
tabooed’ expressions, whereas the speaker of [674] was merely trying to appear
fashionable. Back in 1977, a decree was issued mandating Arabic as the
medium of instruction at the university level in Iraq; and since then, Britain,
the old colonial master, and the U.S. have become bitter military enemies and
imposers of painful embargoes. Yet data like Sallo’s show how popular the use
of English still is (? now has to serve for hamza, the unvoiced glottal stop).
[672] a
-sukhuur
imma ?an
takuun rusuubiyya sedimentary, ?aw
muta
awwila
metamorphic,
?aw
naariyya ?ay igneous [the rocks are
either ...or...or...]
[673] bi
aala
wa
da
lamma nsawwii vagina lavage nshuuf
aakuu blood bil-fluid
illii raa nis aba min al-vagina, fabhaay al- aala mumkin nshuk innahaa pregnant
[when
we carry out vaginal lavage, we see whether there is blood in the
fluid which is taken from the vagina; in that case, we can
suspect that she is pregnant]
[674] naakhudh ?al-inaath
in the early morning [we take the females...]
Even
where code-switching is widespread, governments and institutions have seldom
recognized and exploited its potential for an integrative
program in multilingual education, partly because modern education began
with monolingual methods and partly because languages typically differ sharply
in prestige (cf. VII.29, 57). Such programs are urgently needed in a world where
multilinguism has surpassed monolinguism (V.97; VI.16; VII.29).
35.
As for many pairs of
categories in language or discourse, borrowing and code-switching do not form a
neat dichotomy. Singapore English has many widely-shared borrowings from the
Chinese and Malay whose usage is not felt to constitute code-switching, e.g.,
‘ang pow’ for the gifts distributed among the children of visitors at
Chinese New Year. And most borrowings are not fully Anglicized but retain the
original pronunciation, e.g. ‘otak udang’ (‘prawn-brain’) cited in VI.19
being ['otak 'u:dang] and not, say, ['outæ:k 'ju:dæ:ng]. The influence of
Bahasa spoken in Peninsular Malaysia, wherein final ‘-k’ is now realized as
a glottal stop, might yield the pronunciation ['ota?].
36.
To a discourse
participant unaccustomed to them, interference, borrowing, and code-switching
may seem to disturb communication. However, they do not do so in the cultural
contexts where we mainly find them. [675] is a written note delivered to a
Manila householder by her gardener’s wife, a native speaker of Tagalog-based
Filipino. For elitist English-educated Filipinos, this would be dismissed as
‘Bamboo English’. But the gardener’s message is hardly less clear than if
it had used the ‘standard Filipino English’, the term preferred by Teodoro
Llamzon, e.g. [675a].
[675] Please excused my husban that
caused he is not to worked last Friday. Because he had sicked of two days.
[675a] Please excuse my husband
because he didn’t work last Friday, because he was sick for two days.
The
formal details, e.g., whether ‘he is not to worked’ should correspond to
‘he did not work’ or ‘he did not come to work’ would hardly matter to
the gardener and the householder.
37.
As we often find, a text
that seems objectionable on formal grounds is quite functional for the context
of situation and the agenda (cf. II.75; V.50). In the °lexicogrammatical
economy°, an Emotive Cognition (‘excuse’, i.e., regard without annoyance)
is plainly requested for a Negative Enactive (‘not coming to work’) caused
by a Pejorative Development (‘getting sick’); the only doubtful point is the
Temporal Circumstance, which the text places into the past by more than one day
(hence not ‘yesterday’) but less than one week (hence ‘last Friday’). In
fact, the top of the paper bore the date ‘July 8/89’, which was a Saturday,
but the ‘8’ for the day had been visibly written over a ‘9’. We can
surmise that the message was written Sunday the 9th and then backdated to save
face by seeming more punctual and assiduous; the writer failed to notice that
the revised date would call for ‘yesterday’. This conclusion is plausible
also because ‘two days’ could justify not coming on Saturday in exchange for
Friday.
38.
Regarding
intertextuality, [675] follows the well-defined text type ‘excuse note’
dating from school days and requiring that the sick person not be the writer
(hence not ‘Please excuse me’). For children, this requirement reflects the
social and legal authority of parents to judge between health versus illness of
offspring. An adult gardener should have his own authority, but ours declined to
use it even though he did know how to write, witness his code-switching note
[676] delivered two days later and dated July 11. [676] follows a less
well-defined text type we might call ‘maintenance expense note’. The
handwriting was different and less legible than in the previous note, and the
code-switching indicated a lower fluency in English than the wife’s, limited
mainly to stock collocations of politeness (e.g., ‘thank you very much’).
[676] Pahasa
longmower P
80. Thank you very much.
sharpen
lawnmower pesos eighty
[i.e., it cost eighty pesos to sharpen the
lawnmower]
The
two text types suited two different agendas for the gardener’s professional
role. When he was not fulfilling it in being sick and absent, he addressed his
employer through a third party in a more official note, neatly written all in
English and backdated. But when he was fulfilling it in maintaining the
equipment (‘longmower’ as folk etymology: it mows long grass), he felt
socially competent to address her himself in a casually written note with
code-switching. The householder duly accepted the messages and was satisfied by
the display of concern.
39.
To estimate how
interference from Filipino may have exerted control, we can compare the original
[675] with a plausible Filipino version [675b] (aux
= Auxiliary; det = Determiner).
[675b] Ipagpaumanhin
ang aking asawa sapagkat
siya’y hindi
be-pleased-to-excuse det
my spouse because he-aux
not
nag-trabaho
noong Biyernes, sapagkat siya ay nag-kasakit
ng datawang araw.
past-work on
Friday because
he-aux past-be
sick for two
days
For
instance, since the preposition ‘ng’ corresponds to both ‘for’ and
‘of’ in English, the phrasing ‘of two days’ rather than ‘for two
days’ might seem plausible. Or, Filipino Verb forms need endings, and the
English ones in [675] were outfitted with the common (though inappropriate) Verb
ending ‘-(e)d’. The particle ‘ay’, contracted to ‘-y’ after a form
ending in ‘-a’ (compare English ‘he’s’), is an Auxiliary (aux)
functioning like both ‘is’ and ‘does’ in English Verb Phrases; ‘is not
work’ might get used for ‘did not work’. In sharp contrast to English, the
Non-Finite Process Verb in Filipino is marked for Tense (here with the Prefix
‘nag-’) while the Auxiliary is not; hence ‘is not to worked’ might
appear normal. Also, the Predecessive ‘had sicked’ would indicate that the
‘sicking’ occurred before the ‘not to working’; and since
‘nagkasakit’ is a Process Verb, not ‘be’ + State, a conjugated form like
‘sicked’ makes sense.
40.
How to assess the
orthography is uncertain, since Filipino English is largely a spoken language
variety for an oral culture (or set of cultures). Spellings like ‘husban’
and ‘cause’ might reflect the casual pronunciation heard even among native
speakers of English (cf. IV.232). Or, they might reflect the common loss of
consonants (especially stops) in clusters or in final position in Asian
varieties of English (e.g., when I was alarmed in Thailand by my guide wanting
me to look at ‘handicaps’ when he meant ‘handicrafts’ like
silk-weaving). The two forms ‘cause’ and ‘because’ where Filipino offers
only ‘sapagkat’ were not discrepant, since the handwriting shows the ‘B’
of ‘Because’ written over a ‘C’, suggesting that the writer recognized
the error in the more conspicuous sentence-initial and capitalized position, but
not in the previous Phrase, where the ‘cause’ was aided by an (unnecessary)
‘that’.
41.
Again, we see that
interlingual discourse is still richly controlled, and that the control can be
supported rather than resisted by interference and code-switching. What for a
monolingual may seem to be random, unmotivated sequences may, for the
multilingual speaker, be patterns obeying reasonable though uninformed
constraints. However inappropriate for Oxbridge drawing-rooms, interlingual
discourse offers rich empirical evidence about discourse practices in our
increasingly interconnected world, where an °ecologist program supports the
full validity and value of multilinguism and multiculturalism° (cf. VI.27;
VIII.2).
42.
During such historical
events as wars or invasions, extensive contact suddenly occurs between languages
whose speakers have had no preparation. The ensuing interlingual discourse
converges into a pidgin or a creole: an improvised
interlanguage that becomes an established standing language for a community.
These two terms are not clearly differentiated in local usage; ‘creole’
often suggests a more permanent language, though a ‘pidgin’ can be one too,
as in Nigeria and Ghana. Looking to the future, dropping both terms from public
discourse and coining local names might be the geopolitically fairest option for
shedding a deal of awkward historical baggage.
43.
Most of the documented
pidgins
and
creoles are the heritage of colonialism
: the expropriation of power over
territory and resources legitimized and mystified by political and cultural
paternalism (cf. VIII.9, 19, 28, 30, 55). The language of the colonial powers at
the Center, such as Portuguese, Spanish, French, English, or Dutch, were forced
upon the colonialized people, chiefly by the European settlers
who
moved in to take command of land and production, accompanied by missionaries and
military to assist matters by ‘conversion’ and coercion, respectively. Most
of these usurpers had no knowledge of local languages and no inclination to
learn them; and like formalism and consumerism, colonialism seeks to erase
cultural memories in order to deny the value and validity of the invaded
cultures and their native languages. So the indigenous peoples were compelled to
develop working versions of Center languages in restricted contexts of
situation, chiefly to understand and obey commands for slave labor. In effect, a
severe set of °cognitive and social constraints° was imposed straightaway and
a language was then fitted to them. Despite these dire circumstances, the
resulting languages usually proved generally usable and manifested rather
consistent language-building strategies. They began as °interlanguages° rather
than the mere °proto-languages° with arbitrary ties of sound to meaning and
with no grammar, such as a young child first devises (III.130); and they have
stabilized as full-fledged °natural languages° with their own versions of the
°formal and functional levels° sketched back in II.59-63.
44.
°Simplicity was
financed by relaxing determinacy° (cf. III.41). The phonemic
system of the ‘source language’ was reshaped to reduce unfamiliar
Sounds, e.g., English ‘sh’ going to ‘s’ hence ‘wash’ =>
‘was’, or ‘education’ =>
‘edukesen’ (Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea)
. Distinctions preserved by the source language more in
orthography than in pronunciation were eliminated, e.g., the first three Vowels
in ‘secondary’ written as the same Vowel in ‘sekenderi’, as were silent
letters, e.g., ‘Christmas’ =>
‘krismas’ (also Tok Pisin), thereby giving a clearer written rendition of
pronunciation than standard English has (cf. VI.55ff). A cluster of Consonants
was eased by eliminating some or by inserting epenthetic Vowels, e.g., ‘tanda
dia tele a kom’ (stand there till I come) (Nigerian Pidgin). And so forth. These changes blur some etymological data, e.g., the
relation between ‘education’ (‘edukesen’) versus ‘educate’ (‘eduket’);
but much of the data would not be meaningful in the new regional context, or
would not be culturally relevant, e.g., the derivation of ‘Christmas’ from
‘Christ’s mass’ in early English around 1150.
45.
The grammar
was pressured to do more work with fewer forms, mainly by expanding the role of
word order to signal grammatical relationships or by shifting these over to
lexical (as also happened in the historical evolution of Modern English and
French, VI.53). The pressure encouraged the flattening of Nominal and Verbal
inflections, especially ones signalling Agreement of Subject and Finite Verb,
e.g., by generalizing the Singular of a Noun and the Imperative of a Verb
The proportions between °Content Words versus Function Words° got shifted,
while the distinctness between °Word-Classes or Parts of Speech° decreased. By a process also historically documented for older
languages like English, some new Function Words were created from
source-language Content Words whose meaning suggests the function, such as:
Enactive ‘pass’ for ‘than’, reminding of ‘surpass’; Possessive
‘bilong’ for ‘of’, reminding of the ‘belonging’ often entailed; and
Semiotic ‘say’ for ‘that’ reminding of the prototypical Verb
‘saying’ to frame a discourse; compare the presumed derivation of English
‘than’ and ‘of’ from adverbial items meaning ‘then’ and ‘away’
(cf. IV.112ff). Here too, the
lexicogrammar got pressed toward its lexical end: the co-texts of the new °Function
Words° remained similar to those of the old, while the new lexical connections
made them more memorable.
[677] I tink say dem all done sleep-o […] Soja better pass police (Chinua Achebe)
[678] Em i wasim na rausim tru ol
kainkain pipia long ol klos bilong yu
(Wantok, 18 Aug. 1971) [i.e.,
it (<= him) washes and removes through all kinds (of) stains in
all clothes of you]
At
times, Function Words without English correlates got adopted from local
languages, such as Interrogative signals like ‘še’ in ‘še you go come’
(‘you will come?’) which has a Predecessive form ‘šebi’ too, e.g., in 'šebi a don tell you?’ (‘haven’t I told you?’); or like the framing
‘be’-Verb ‘na’ in ‘na your face be dis?’ (‘is it that this is your
face?’) (Nigerian Pidgin; compare French ‘est-ce que…?’).
46. Monolinguals accustomed to their standard categories and formalist views of language might argue that simplifying phonemic and grammatical systems destroys vital data. In practice, however, most of these formal data are functionally redundant or inferable from context, a principle noticed in spoken Mandarin Chinese (cf. IV.195) and reported by Hasan for spoken Urdu (VI.13). Moreover, pidginization can even enrich the language with discourse practices less readily available in the standard, e.g., reduplication for the Intensive (‘luk’ for ‘look’ and ‘lukluk’ for ‘stare at’; ‘fain’ for ‘lovely’ and ‘fainfain’ for ‘very lovely’), or for the Frequentive, e.g., in describing a redoubtable rock band, with onomatopoetic effects too (Nigerian Pidgin, reported by A.B.K. Dadzie):
[679] which
kan gbamgbam dim dim noise be? […] am beatbeat am welwel
[what can that noise (of drumming and bass guitar sounds) be? […] he
beats it (him = the drum) a lot and very well]
47.
Cultural contexts too
are linked to interesting shifts of meaning. We find ‘Christmas’, a festival
at the end of the year, becoming ‘krismas’ for ‘year of age’ in Tok
Pisin; and ‘sofahed’ from ‘suffer + ‘head’ for ‘a person who suffers
a lot’ in Nigerian Pidgin (a schlemiel?). Though monolinguals may not know,
such processes for transferring plausible meanings is documented in standard
English as well, e.g., ‘jerkwater’, from an isolated stopping place for old
steam-engine locomotives to draw water, coming to mean ‘small, rural,
insignificant’ for a town.
48. At
all events, a pidgin may offer the only realistic and practical medium of
communication in many multilingual states, such as resulted from colonialist
policies of drawing up geographical units across linguistic boundaries in order
to prevent consolidated resistance (VIII.30). Such is true for the English-based
Pidgin used in Nigeria among the speakers of local languages whose total number
is estimated as high as 400. It is a vital resource for interacting beyond the
narrower circles of family, barrio, village, or ‘tribe’. It varies
spontaneously from region to region, and its flexible lexicogrammar accommodates
the diverse organizational drifts of these languages. And by incorporating words
from local languages, it helps increase people’s familiarity with each
other’s languages, e.g., Hausa ‘wahala’ in ‘carry your wahala go’
(i.e., go away with your problem), or (with Igbo ‘ughalugba’, an
untranslatable word for the ‘uncontrolled mayhem that can result in some
market places in Nigeria’ with ‘dire consequences’) in ‘if you no do am,
ughalugba wahala go bost o’ (‘if you don’t do it, a dire problem will bust
out’).
49. Furthermore,
the social uses of pidgins and creoles are vital to a culture. One illustrious
use is for story-telling, e.g., [680] in St. Vincent Creole about the famous
trickster spider-hero Nansi or Anansi. Less established but gaining are uses in
religious and literary discourse, e.g., [681] in Kamtok of Cameroon for a Sunday Lectionary and [682] in Krio of Sierra Leone (hab
= habitual).
[680] Won de, Nansi wen dong
Tukuma gu tell aal dyem gyel hau hi doz raid Bru Lai-an. Wel Bru Lai-an didn
fill su veri pliiz abaut dat su neks taim wen i sii Brer Nansi i aks Brer Nansi
hau hi kud gu aut Tukuma gu tel aal dyem gyel hau i doz raid om. [‘One day,
Anansi went down to Tukuma go tell all them girls how he does (hab)
ride Brother Lion. Well, Brother Lion didn’t feel so very pleased about that
so next time when he see Brother Anansi he ask him how he could go out to Tukuma
go tell all them girls how he does (hab)
ride him.’]
[681]
God he talk say,
Woman-pikin
[daughter] for Zion, make you glad plenty […]
Look,
your king he do come for look you;
He
done win war; he done finish the enemy.
He
de come like poor man for up [upon] jackass
[682]
I tinap,
misεf tinap, te a put in
kalbas dong.
she
stop, myself stop,
then I put the calabash down
A se ‘usai
yu komot,
bo?’ ‘A
komot
Fula Tong.’
I
say where you come-out-from love
I come-out-from Fula Town
I
sεt im
mot, a
sεt mi mot, i
tan lεk
spirit pas;
She
shut her mouth, I shut my mouth it
was like spirit pass
So te a dro
am kam
klos mi
fo kam sidom
na di
gras.
until
I draw her
come close me for come sit-down on the grass
The
skills for story-telling flourish in oral cultures and help to preserve
solidarity and cultural memories in the face of the erasures and displacements
perpetrated by colonial invasions and slavery (cf. V.79). The St. Vincent story
documents ties to African culture, where folktales also feature the spider-hero
Nansi or Anansi.
50.
And yet pidgins and
creoles have been subjected to continual disrespect and misprision. These
attitudes had °adaptive value for the colonialist agenda in claiming cultural
superiority to legitimize the illegal seizure of territory and power° (cf.
VIII.28ff). Even after the institutions of colonialism receded, the attitudes
have persisted and enforced the policy we might call linguicism,
a mode of linguistic imperialism
defined by Tove Skuttnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson as ‘ideologies,
structures, and practices that are used to legitimize’ and ‘reproduce an
unequal division of power and resources’ ‘between groups that are defined on
the basis of language’ — often groups also targeted for ethnic or racial
discrimination (cf. VII.167, 342; VIII.33). In an unhappy cycle, linguicism can
be internalized even by the speakers of a pidgin or a creole. A 1982 survey by
my former student Joe Amoako found Ghanaians denying they their pidgin even
though they do, or calling it ‘the language of ruffians’. When I was
lecturing at the University of Lagos in 1993 and energetically advocated giving
Nigerian Pidgin an official status, violent objections were raised by Nigerian
academics who had studied in Great Britain and who identified the
‘interests’ of the Nigerian people with their own privileges. Still,
emphatic agreement was voiced by faculty who were former pupils of the novelist
Wole Soyinka and the linguist Ayo
Bamgbo
se, both renowned champions of
African culture.
51.
In return, more populist
circles may not regard former colonial standard languages so highly. In
Amoako’s data, British English was mocked by pidgin speakers as ‘booklong’,
a term highlighting how heavily standardization depends on lengthy written texts
(cf. VII.62, 81, 162, 224, 232). Conversely, a creole may be considered ‘the
language of honesty, truth, and sincerity’, whereas a non-creole may be
suspected of ‘some aura of falseness’, witness the Phrase ‘fai la
France’ (‘act the French way’) in Haitian creole meaning ‘to talk a lot
and say nothing’ (compare the widespread use of French by say-nothing
diplomats) (cf. VI.58). And in England, London Jamaican is spoken ‘both as a
reaction against racial discrimination and a means of asserting pride in one’s
blackness’.
52.
The global recession
impels °linguicism to enlist language attitudes as more presentable pretexts
for inequality and denial of human rights° (cf. VII.170, 228, 233, 342). Posing
as civic-minded °language guardians° and launching campaigns to ‘protect
language standards against corruption’ looks much better than openly preaching
snobbery, selfishness, and discrimination and gets the same long-range effects.
The damage is severe enough in Center societies, as we will see in Ch. VII; in
Periphery societies, where the distinctions between language varieties are more
conspicuous, it is devastating. If linguists pay proper attention to ordinary
discourse and to pidgins and creoles, they should know that formal correctness,
upon which traditional schooling lavishes so much effort with so little effect,
is not at all essential for successful communication. We have no grounds or
excuse whatever for accusing ‘modern linguists’ of being ‘dangerously
sentimental about creoles’ that supposedly ‘constitute in most communities a
distinct handicap’ to ‘personal intellectual development’.
53.
The crowning irony is
that the prideful colonial languages of the Center themselves started out as
popular improvised languages in lively contact and rapid change, undergoing
evolutions like those sketched in VI.44-47. If we compare French, Spanish, and
Portuguese with Latin, or Modern English with Old English, we see them
remodeling their Sound systems, e.g., reducing Consonant clusters, and
flattening their Nominal and Verbal inflections, viz. Latin ‘clamat’ =>
Spanish ‘llama’, as well as shifting popular words into the standard, e.g.,
Latin ‘testa’ for ‘helmet’ becoming ‘head’ in Italian’.[cf. todd 86f] The Romance languages were long
misprized too as ‘vernaculars’ by conservative institutions, who insisted
that only Latin was a pure language fit for prestigious discourse (VII.58).
Through mere °frozen accidents° in the history of politics, economics, and
technology, some of these erstwhile ‘vernaculars’ have become, as Latin once
was, exalted as the very models of what language should be at its best and as
rallying points for a doomed purity (cf. VIII.28). Once more, formalism erases
cultural memories (cf. I.12; II.121; V.79; VI.12, 43, 49).
54.
These historical
parallels refute all commonsense claims that today’s pidgins and creoles are
inherently fit for ‘primitive’ communication only. As over fifty years of
serious research have shown, they are well-suited for oral cultures that have
not yet had reason to develop and cultivate the categories of formal written
prose. The richness lies in the communicative situations rather than in the
transcribed forms. But with proper motivation and support, they could readily
evolve for further uses, such as discourse for special purposes (‘DSP’),
instead of merely bowing to the international dominance of colonial Center
languages, especially English (V.74). Some initiatives in this direction can be
seen in the public campaigns I shall cite in a moment.
55.
A key step in advancing
the status of pidgins and creoles would be the promotion of general
literacy. For appropriate
motives,
they could all be written; in fact, their simplification of the phonemic systems
creates favorable conditions for a pretty accurate alphabetic representation
(like a ‘phonetic spelling’), which, aside from Spanish and Dutch, most
colonial languages lack (VI.44, 56). For example, the Djuka creole, which is a
medium of instruction in Surinam, has been used in a successful literacy
campaign. Tok Pisin in Papua
New Guinea was used in a brochure promoting general secondary schooling, with
the title ‘Komyuniti Sekenderi Edukesen Em I Wanem Samting?’ (‘community
secondary education him is one something?’, i.e., what is it?). And Nigerian
Pidgin was the medium for an ecological campaign:
[683] You see se [say, i.e. that]
awa foresti de pafuka [are being destroyed]. Make una [see to it that you] no
waste time at all at all. Make una plant one tiri [tree] everyday.
56.
Yet the issue of writing
remains contentious. One specialist, Loreto Todd, who otherwise ably defends the
value of pidgins and creoles for their ‘maximum utility in a contact
situation’ within ‘societies not enslaved by the notion of literate
standards’, draws the line and rejects written versions on the grounds that
their ‘orthography’ ‘clashes with standard English’.In her view, ‘standard English orthography reflects no specific
pronunciation’, but in my view that’s mainly because it does a wretched job
of reflecting contemporary pronunciation at all (II.24) and clings to historical
debris like the silent letters ‘gh’ after Vowels. When Todd declares that
‘in our world, to be literate in any meaningful sense is to be able to read
and write in the standard language’, I am uncomfortably reminded of the complacent °monoculturalism
in Center societies cultivating pretexts to deny their de facto multiculturalism°
(VII.E). I am also puzzled by her fears that ‘to be liberal in educational
policies’ could ‘penalize the recipients’ because ‘initial ease of
acquisition may exact an unacceptably high price — the limiting of literacy
for many to the pidgin and creole’. She invokes ‘the desires of the
parents’ and ‘the mature needs of the pupils’, and concludes with the
dictum that ‘education is meant to open doors, not barricade them from
within’. As I shall argue in Ch. VII, education does bar doors, and the most
insidious tactic is to disdain or repress the home language varieties of
learners (VII.171ff).
57.
Several further
inconsistencies deserve notice here. Although spoken pidgin certainly does not
blot out the spoken standard, written pidgin is predicted to blot out the
written standard. More plausibly, the competition would in fact be far lower in
writing because the differences would be more conspicuous and consensual. Also,
reading research shows that children whose native language is English are helped
rather than ‘barricaded’ if they start their reading in a simplified
spelling more consistent with spoken sounds; it was conservative parents and
teachers who rejected this innovation (cf. VII.175).
58.
A further inconsistency
impends when Todd argues ‘not that pidgins and creoles are incapable of being
used as vehicles of instruction’, but that it is ‘impractical and
educationally disadvantageous’ to do so. I think it’s quite impractical and disadvantageous not to. As she
admits, teachers ‘in such regions ‘can rarely sustain a teaching program
entirely in the standard’, and ‘even if they could’, they might be
‘talking above the linguistic competence of their pupils’ and fostering
‘alienation’ or a complete ‘breakdown in communication’. So the routine
practices would be to piously pretend adhering to the standard, while
stressfully stigmatizing the pidgin or creole that could actually serve
communication far better. Intriguingly, some field studies show that ‘school
teachers’ ‘may be forced to move into creole to convince the children that
they really mean what they are saying’, as reported for Antigua by Karl
Reisman (cf. VI.51).
59.
The really cogent
‘practical’ factor is that the great majority of pupils will be more fluent
in the pidgin than the standard. To forbid them to write in it is to discard
their nearest resource for attaining literacy in favor of a distant one which,
for English and French, might well seem diabolically devised to plunge the
would-be speller into outer darkness. What most pupils at the Periphery urgently
need is not the ‘international mobility’ supposedly offered by the standard
— which has only led many talented individuals to emigrate to the Center —
but access to the knowledge for attaining meaningful and productive careers at
home (cf. VII.29).
60.
The danger of
‘limitations’ is implausible on historical grounds too. The parallel between
the emergence of French, Spanish, etc. from Latin and the emergence of the
creoles (VI.53), demonstrates how well speakers and writers can overcome any
limitations they sense in their language. Only misguided attitudes and
inadequate informational technology prevent the pidgins and creoles of today
from progressing the same way. And the widespread use of writing would give a
powerful encouragement by raising the public esteem for these languages and
facilitating the preservation and dissemination of changes and innovations,
especially in discourse for special purposes and terminology (VI.54). Viewing
‘literacy in pidgin and creole’ as a ‘limitation’ is too near the
colonialist doctrine of ‘intellectual handicap’ Todd had expressly rejected
(cf. VI.52).
61. In sum, the °ecologist goal of free access to knowledge and society through discourse° sets firm priorities for cultural and educational policy. This goal can be promoted by resolutely enlisting pidgins and creoles and encouraging their widespread use, both spoken and written, both general and special, wherever they are already the de facto medium of wider communication. The dour warnings of local elites and °purist language guardians° are both misguided and misleading. What is endangered today is not the ‘standard’ languages but the °linguistic human rights° of all speakers and minority groups whose language is made a pretext for the denial of basic freedoms (cf. III.116; VII.342ff; VIII.20). The growing threat of °global linguicism° (in the sense of VI.50) must be firmly resisted by fully accrediting pidgins and creoles everywhere people know and use them
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