This is a collection of ten papers that examines a variety of language-contact phenomena: contemporary, transposed, immigrant-language situations; contact in border areas in diachronic perspective; phonological innovation; translation of EU documents; and a crosslinguistic comparison of political discourses. The book is based on a selection of papers presented at the Language Contact in Times of Globalization conference, held at the University of Groningen in 2006.
Pieter Muysken's examination of ethnolects is the book's first paper. Muysken's background discussion refers first to popular notions of ethnolects, based chiefly on the features of American English among some Americans of Polish, Italian, or Spanish origin. These situations mirror his description of ethnolects based on a shift perspective, in which there is acquisition of a second language by large groups of speakers, with some linguistic features of the L1 remaining for the reaffirmation of ethnic or regional identities. A second and more complex analysis of ethnolects involves a multidimensional perspective in which factors such as (in)complete acquisition, street language, lexical and morphosyntactic innovation from speakers of different L1 backgrounds all contribute to the emergence of various speech styles.
In other papers, personal-pronoun usage of two immigrant languages spoken in the United States—Spanish and Estonian—is examined with similar findings: subject and/or personal pronouns are found to be more frequent in the speech of first-generation migrants to the US compared to homeland speakers. The likely cause of this is transfer (in form and function) of overt pronouns, required in English as a non-pro-drop language. The findings are similar, notwithstanding the differences in the typological paradigms of the two languages: Spanish is a pro-drop language; Estonian is a mixed null-subject language where third person subjects can be dropped and all pronouns have both long and short forms.
The last paper dealing with transposed, immigrant languages, by Seza Doğruöz & Ad Backus, is on the Turkish of second-generation speakers in The Netherlands. Extensive code switching is reported among this group of speakers, and the authors are able to record examples of syntactic innovation in Dutch Turkish, which, while not prohibited in homeland Turkish, remains statistically infrequent. Doğruöz & Backus hypothesize that such innovations are individual and that it is too early to speak of systematic or habitualized change across the second-generation sample.
Historical loans into Dutch and Swedish are examined by Charlotte Gooskens, Renée van Bezooijen, & Sebastian Kürschner, who locate a higher percentage of low-German origin loans in Swedish, while, for Dutch, loans tend to be of French origin.
Two papers deal with phonological features. Wilbert Heeringa, John Nerbonne & Petya Osenova examine proximate Bulgarian dialects from a perspective of areal typology, while Jason Shaw & Rahul Balusu's paper records differences in phonological features among two generations of Japanese L1 speakers due to the influence of English borrowings and transfers, as well as proficiency levels in English. Finally, Nicola Borrelli examines the discourse of EU documents to see how national perspectives of Euro-scepticism and Euro-friendliness are represented in translations from French into English and Italian.
