This book explores the influence of language shift on speakers’ linguistic practices and even their social life and world view, through the case study of the expression of emotions in two languages involved in a shift: Kriol, an English-based creole of northern Australia, which is replacing Dalabon, an indigenous Australian language. The book takes a cross-disciplinary approach including linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and other social sciences. It contains eight chapters and a conclusion.
The first three chapters are introductory. Chapter 1 reviews research on the association between language and culture, linguistic relativity and linguistic diversity. Unlike previous studies, the book approaches language shift from the vantage point of the semantic domain of emotions. Chapter 2 presents additional contextualizing information on emotions, including defining emotions from the perspectives of private states and cognition, highlighting the depth of the relationship between language and emotions, and clarifying some important distinctions and terms with respect to the linguistic encoding of emotions. Chapter 3 presents the linguistic, sociolinguistic, and methodological background to the volume.
The following two chapters suggest that meaning is plastic, and not constrained by form, as the massive replacement of lexical forms that results from language shift to Kriol is not accompanied by a corresponding shift in meanings and communicative functions (chapter 4). Conversely, the form of a highly conventionalized emotional prosodic contour is preserved, but its meaning and communicative function are changed (chapter 5).
Chapter 6 discusses the linguistic resources that compensate for the lack of evaluative morphology in Kriol. The older morphological diminutives in Dalabon are replaced by three main alternatives with different historical sources in Kriol: lexical diminutives (< adjectives or adverbs, lil and lilbit (< Eng. ‘little’, ‘bit’), ol (< Eng. ‘old’)), the compassionate interjection bobala (< Eng. ‘poor fellow’) and the semantic extension of reduplication. This suggests that language is a remarkably malleable tool, in that resources can be adapted to speakers’ expressive needs.
By contrast, language shift has a much stronger impact on figurative representations of emotions. Chapter 7 shows that Kriol, unlike Dalabon, does not make extensive figurative use of the body in expressing emotions. The author refers to two principles identified by Jeff Siegel: the ‘availability constraint’ relates the infrequency of such expressions to the lack of appropriate transfer targets in English, while the ‘reinforcement principle’ explains the few examples that are found in Kriol as shared by several substrate languages of the area. Overall, with respect to emotion tropes, Kriol probably resembles English more than it resembles Dalabon or many other Australian languages. However, chapter 8 demonstrates that if one goes beyond language to investigate gesture, then there is evidence for the conceptual survival of body-based tropes among Kriol speakers.
In sum, this book is a valuable contribution to studies on the impact of language shift, not only because of its focus on the domain of emotions in a creole, but also in shedding light on what is retained under language ‘loss’. It emphasizes through empirical research that using a new language may have limited impact on the way speakers communicate and represent the world.
