Résumé Cette étude examine le traitement différentiel de certaines géminations consonantiques dans l’espagnol caribéen colombien, à l’intersection des dynamiques de contact linguistique et des hiérarchies sociales. À partir d’une enquête qualitative menée à Santa Marta, un métaterme local – golpeado (« frappé ») – est identifié comme désignant de façon stigmatisante certaines géminations, notamment celles consécutives à une liquide implosive (/l/, /R/). Un test perceptif contrôlé mené auprès d’un second groupe confirme que seules les assimilations de ces segments, historiquement associées au contact avec les langues nigéro-congolaises, suscitent une disqualification sociale, tandis que d’autres géminations analogues passent inaperçues. L’analyse articule les concepts d’indexicalité, de rhématisation et d’effacement pour montrer que la perception linguistique est orientée par des attentes sociales et des stéréotypes raciaux. Ce travail plaide pour une approche critique de la linguistique de contact, intégrant les dimensions idéologiques de la réception phonétique dans les contextes postcoloniaux.
Differential Object Marking ( DOM ) is observed in Tukanoan languages of Northwest Amazonia, where certain direct objects receive distinct marking based on their semantic or pragmatic properties. Tariana (Arawak) in the Vaupés area exhibits differential case-marking influenced by contact with Tukano. Similar patterns are seen in the languages of Caquetá-Putumayo ( C - P ) region, home to Witotoan, Boran, Arawak, and Andoke peoples, suggesting shared grammatical features due to contact. DOM emerges as a significant category in C - P languages, with variations in triggering parameters such as definiteness and animacy. This study offers the first detailed areal analysis of C - P DOM systems, highlighting their diversity. The findings contribute to typological research, addressing a gap in understanding DOM in Northwest Amazonia and showcasing linguistic interactions and diversity in the region.
This paper investigates codeswitching among migrants who have returned and settled in their home village of Montefalcione, in the province of Avellino (South of Italy), from the English cities of Bedford and Peterborough. From a linguistic point of view, returnees are multilinguals who spent their childhood in a migrant setting, during which time they were exposed both to their family language(s) and the dominant language of the society. They subsequently moved back to their families’ country and are, thus, no longer exposed to their L2. The data was collected from 1st and 2nd of returnees. The paper focuses on codeswitching to English in these two groups. The results of the study provide evidence that insertion is the predominant pattern of codeswitching and is primarily related to specific domains (work, society, food …). The data highlight that the semantic specificity described by Backus (2001) plays a crucial role in insertion pattern also in returnees.
This paper provides an overview of contact-induced influences that Polish exerts on Polish Sign Language ( PJM ). It investigates strategies such as mouthing and fingerspelling as well as lexemes, including loan signs, initialized signs and signs originating from semantic translations of and phonetic analogy. Mouthing is the voiceless articulation of Polish words while signing, whereas fingerspelling uses a manual alphabet for transliterating words. Both strategies help disambiguate polysemy and express concepts lacking dedicated signs. Moreover, fingerspelled words can be reduced to loan signs. Initialized signs incorporate initial letters of Polish words through manual letter handshapes. Semantic translation involves borrowing a word’s meaning and expressing it with an equivalent sign. In contrast, phonetic analogues occur when a single sign represents two semantically unrelated concepts due to their phonetic similarity in Polish. This study is framed in the context of translanguaging and semiotic repertoires research, but also a broader field of linguistic multimodality.
This paper explores the intricate locative system of Helvécian Portuguese, a lesser-known Afro-Brazilian variety spoken by descendants of formerly enslaved Africans in the rural community of Helvécia, Bahia. The variety offers a comprehensive case of contact-induced change. Unlike Standard Portuguese, which uses prepositions such as em ‘in, on, at’ to encode location, Helvécian Portuguese exhibits a variable system centered around the multifunctional preposition ni . Functionally similar to the Yorùbá preposition ní , ni heads the Basic Locative Construction in Helvécian Portuguese and encodes motion. The results of this study suggest that Helvécian Portuguese was significantly influenced by Yorùbá during its formation period in the 19th century, supported by sociohistorical evidence of a consistent Yorùbá presence in the settlement then known as Colônia Leopoldina. The semantic parallels found between the Yorùbá and Helvécian locative systems reinforce the contact hypothesis, suggesting a language congruence phenomenon in which non-native speakers adopted familiar spatial encoding strategies. This paper contributes to the broader understanding of Afro-Brazilian Portuguese by documenting an innovative locative system shaped by Niger-congo languages within the colonial Brazilian context.
The present paper focuses on the phenomenon of remigration from the Republic of Moldova - a small Eastern European country located between Romania and Ukraine, and one of the former Soviet republics with the highest levels of international emigration since the early 1990s. Following the country's independence (1991) and subsequent economic and political instability, large waves of Moldovan citizens have sought employment abroad, particularly in Western Europe and Russia. In recent years, however, a growing number of migrants have returned to Moldova, giving rise to new sociocultural dynamics and identity negotiations. This study pays particular attention to the sociolinguistic component of remigration. Utilizing a corpus of 35 migraphies (= 'migration biographies'; Olariu, 2024; Olariu and Olariu, 2024) recorded between 2018 and 2020 in the capital city of Chi.inau and its surroundings, we identified a typology of Moldovan remigrants based on socio-demographic and psycho-cultural criteria. From a sociolinguistic perspective, a key focus was on how Moldovan migrants, all of whom are bilingual due to the environment in which they grew up and lived, relate to this new linguistic experience within the migration context. Beyond the general issues typical of the sociolinguistic integration of migrants into host societies (such as language loyalty, language shift, language contact, etc.), the recorded migraphies reveal an aspect somewhat specific to Moldovan migrants compared to other Eastern European countries: the significance of native bilingualism for the rapid and successful integration of migrants into destination countries. This aspect may set Moldovan remigration apart from other Eastern European migration experiences and contributes to broader discussions on multilingualism and identity in post-migration contexts.
This article investigates the origin of West Flemish composite plural pronouns of the type winder 'we', jinder similar to ginder 'you', and zinder 'they'. These forms are of particular interest to contact linguistics, given that very similar ones found their way into the three Dutch-lexicon creoles that were once spoken in the Caribbean. Whereas the first part of these composite pronouns clearly contains a simplex pronominal root, this article is concerned with the etymon of the second, suffixed component, -nder. The reigning consensus is that all Dutch dialectal plural compound pronouns, including the West Flemish forms in -nder, were construed with the Dutch noun lieden 'people'. We consider an alternative etymology involving ander 'other' and propose that the forms were calqued on Belgian French pronouns of the type nous/vous/eux autres, thus representing a salient case of French-Dutch language contact.
This article analyses how playful, deliberate translanguaging can serve to reflect, construct and perform the identity of the Vlach community from Eastern Serbia, which speaks a Romance variety that is historically and structurally related to Romanian. I focus on "Vlasi na kvadrat,a Facebook page comprising memes, and in particular, on the ways in which the page becomes a translanguaging space in which the administrator and the community practice their multilingualism creatively and critically. Through humour and deliberate translanguaging, the administrator of the page manages to mimic the spontaneous everyday multilingual practices of the Vlach community, but also to creatively perform the community's hybrid identity.
Romanian is the most widely spoken first language among foreign residents in Italy, following Italian. Migration from Romania began after the fall of the communist regime and intensified with EU accession in 2007, leading to the formation of a sizeable second-generation Romanian population. Despite their relevance for heritage language research, the linguistic practices of these speakers remain largely understudied. Drawing on a microcorpus of narratives based on the picture story Frog, Where Are You? by Mercer Mayer, this paper investigates the linguistic features of Romanian spoken as a heritage language by second-generation Romanian children aged 5-i0 in Italy, focusing on the influence of Italian. The findings highlight significant language mixing with Italian and frequent transfer phenomena from it, such as lexical borrowings as well as semantic and morphosyntactic calques, interpreted within the framework of the Integrated Multilingual Model. The paper also explores the sociolinguistic context of Romanian as a heritage language in Italy, emphasizing the roles of community, family, and education in language maintenance. This research contributes to the understanding of bilingual language development in contexts involving closely related languages, offering insights into the dynamics of language shift and preservation in post-immigration communities.
The city of Castellon de la Plana, in eastern Spain, has seen a large influx of Romanians in the past decades, with a sizeable Romanian community and an increasing number of second-generation Romanian speakers. Based on an empirical survey involving interviews and questionnaires, this article presents and discusses their attitudes towards Romanian and the local languages, when and how they use their heritage language, as well as their attitude towards mixing languages. This is followed by an analysis of syntactic features occurring in the variety of Romanian spoken by these heritage speakers that differ from standard Romanian. It is shown that certain areas of syntax appear to be more permeable to contact influence than others, leading to the conclusion that second-generation Romanian in Castellon is in the process of developing its own set of structural characteristics, though it may disappear as a heritage language before these features are fully developed.
This paper is a first approach to the beliefs about the intercomprehension/intelligibility between Spanish and Romanian, expressed by speakers in spontaneous discourses. The difficulty of documenting them has led us to explore the possibilities of extracting information from Q&A platforms, such as Reddit and Quora. These platforms allow users to pose questions and get answers on various topics, including languages. Q&A platforms make a lot of identified data available and are relatively easy to access and extract. The choice of Romanian and Spanish responds to the fact that both are languages which have ample spaces for contact, including the virtual space, which offers many possibilities for spontaneous discourse. The data obtained have allowed us to create a corpus of spontaneous interactions of Q&A platforms, the CorQ&A corpus. Despite the inefficiency in data retrieval, we gathered enough information to advance our objective and synthesize beliefs about the intercomprehension of Romanian and Spanish with other Romance languages.
While Buenos Aires-Spanish exhibits many contact-induced features as a result of immigration in the past, less is known about the potential "Spanish" traces in contemporary Italian that is spoken as a heritage language in the Argentinean capital. The present research investigates the differences between Argentinean Italian and homeland Italian via an exploration of morphosyntactic phenomena and their vulnerability to variation and change. The online acceptability judgement task, which was conducted using a Likert scale, revealed significant differences between heritage speakers and Italian speakers in all the areas that were tested. On average, the most salient discrepancies were found in the use of articles, followed by the use of the clitics and, finally, in the word order in wh-questions. The findings shed light on the language dynamics, contribute to the documentation of Italian HL, address methodological challenges, and present the distinctive linguistic scenario that is shaped by immigration and cultural intertwining.
We define Hasidic Yiddish in New York as a `diaspora language' spoken in trans-local, trans-national communities by descendants of migrants with no direct connection to a homeland or monolingual baseline. Drawing on a corpus of recordings of public speech, we test predictions of a model that regards borrowing as alteration of routines of managing a multilingual repertoire, conditioned by several pull factors. We identify borrowings from American English around idiomatic collocations, interaction management devices, expressions that process clashes of presuppositional expectations, ambiguity-fusion and pattern replication.
Differential Object Marking (DOM) is observed in Tukanoan languages of Northwest Amazonia, where certain direct objects receive distinct marking based on their semantic or pragmatic properties. Tariana (Arawak) in the Vaupes area exhibits differential case-marking influenced by contact with Tukano. Similar patterns are seen in the languages of Caqueta-Putumayo (C-P) region, home to Witotoan, Boran, Arawak, and Andoke peoples, suggesting shared grammatical features due to contact. DOM emerges as a significant category in C-P languages, with variations in triggering parameters such as definiteness and animacy. This study offers the first detailed areal analysis of C-P DOM systems, highlighting their diversity. The findings contribute to typological research, addressing a gap in understanding DOM in Northwest Amazonia and showcasing linguistic interactions and diversity in the region.
This article investigates the origin of West Flemish composite plural pronouns of the type winder ‘we’, jinder~ginder ‘you’, and zinder ‘they’. These forms are of particular interest to contact linguistics, given that very similar ones found their way into the three Dutch-lexicon creoles that were once spoken in the Caribbean. Whereas the first part of these composite pronouns clearly contains a simplex pronominal root, this article is concerned with the etymon of the second, suffixed component, ‑ nder . The reigning consensus is that all Dutch dialectal plural compound pronouns, including the West Flemish forms in ‑ nder , were construed with the Dutch noun lieden ‘people’. We consider an alternative etymology involving ander ‘other’ and propose that the forms were calqued on Belgian French pronouns of the type nous / vous / eux autres , thus representing a salient case of French-Dutch language contact.
The present study explores the nativisation process of Mozambican Portuguese through the prism of one innovative construction, Recipient passives, that emerged out of contact with local Bantu languages (Firmino, 2024). More specifically, it provides fresh insights regarding the social distribution of such passives and the influence of language contact on their formation. The paper adopts a constructional approach to language change and challenges the derivational link often established between Recipient passives and Double Object constructions (Gonçalves, 2010; Gonçalves et al., 2022). This study uses experimental data from an acceptability judgement task collected in Mozambique among university students. It will be shown that Recipient passives display high acceptability ratings across participants’ profiles, regardless of their region of origin and first language, and that language contact no longer seems to directly influence the use of these passives, providing evidence that Recipient passives have become an indigenised feature of MP .
We define Hasidic Yiddish in New York as a ‘diaspora language’ spoken in trans-local, trans-national communities by descendants of migrants with no direct connection to a homeland or monolingual baseline. Drawing on a corpus of recordings of public speech, we test predictions of a model that regards borrowing as alteration of routines of managing a multilingual repertoire, conditioned by several pull factors. We identify borrowings from American English around idiomatic collocations, interaction management devices, expressions that process clashes of presuppositional expectations, ambiguity-fusion and pattern replication.
While Buenos Aires-Spanish exhibits many contact-induced features as a result of immigration in the past, less is known about the potential “Spanish” traces in contemporary Italian that is spoken as a heritage language in the Argentinean capital. The present research investigates the differences between Argentinean Italian and homeland Italian via an exploration of morphosyntactic phenomena and their vulnerability to variation and change. The online acceptability judgement task, which was conducted using a Likert scale, revealed significant differences between heritage speakers and Italian speakers in all the areas that were tested. On average, the most salient discrepancies were found in the use of articles, followed by the use of the clitics and, finally, in the word order in wh-questions. The findings shed light on the language dynamics, contribute to the documentation of Italian HL , address methodological challenges, and present the distinctive linguistic scenario that is shaped by immigration and cultural intertwining.
The city of Castellón de la Plana, in eastern Spain, has seen a large influx of Romanians in the past decades, with a sizeable Romanian community and an increasing number of second-generation Romanian speakers. Based on an empirical survey involving interviews and questionnaires, this article presents and discusses their attitudes towards Romanian and the local languages, when and how they use their heritage language, as well as their attitude towards mixing languages. This is followed by an analysis of syntactic features occurring in the variety of Romanian spoken by these heritage speakers that differ from standard Romanian. It is shown that certain areas of syntax appear to be more permeable to contact influence than others, leading to the conclusion that second-generation Romanian in Castellón is in the process of developing its own set of structural characteristics, though it may disappear as a heritage language before these features are fully developed.
This paper is a first approach to the beliefs about the intercomprehension/intelligibility between Spanish and Romanian, expressed by speakers in spontaneous discourses. The difficulty of documenting them has led us to explore the possibilities of extracting information from Q&A platforms, such as Reddit and Quora. These platforms allow users to pose questions and get answers on various topics, including languages. Q&A platforms make a lot of identified data available and are relatively easy to access and extract. The choice of Romanian and Spanish responds to the fact that both are languages which have ample spaces for contact, including the virtual space, which offers many possibilities for spontaneous discourse. The data obtained have allowed us to create a corpus of spontaneous interactions of Q&A platforms, the CorQ&A corpus. Despite the inefficiency in data retrieval, we gathered enough information to advance our objective and synthesize beliefs about the intercomprehension of Romanian and Spanish with other Romance languages.
