Abstract 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.

Abstract This study examines the L2 German verb placement preferences in 58 Korean immigrant workers in Germany. The verb placement preferences are compared to predictions of Organic Grammar (Vainikka and Young-Scholten, 2011). Assuming an incremental, bottom-up morphosyntactic development, the theory predicts the possibility that L2 acquirers develop only partial clausal structures. Organic Grammar further proposes a two-tree approach of morphosyntactic development and predicts that main clauses with verb-second order (V2) are acquired before subordinate clauses with verb-final order (OV). To test these predictions, participants completed two production tasks. Results show a mixed picture. Some participants’ L2 clausal structure seems to have developed only partially, supporting the incremental approach. Regarding the predicted order of acquisition, however, some participants who showed robust use of targetlike subordination with OV, struggled with V2, preferring V3 instead. This suggests the need for a revision of the two-tree approach to incorporate the V3 preference.

Abstract The conceptual and formal linguistic differences between Irish and English with regards to predicative possession have arguably had an effect on the grammar of the contact-induced English variety of Irish English (IrE). An analysis of IrE and British English (BrE) data shows variation in the range of meanings conveyed by the construction [NP1 have (got) NP2] – variation that is even more significant between standard IrE and traditional rural IrE. Considering the different degrees of Irish language influence on each dataset, this variation is explored in the context of the original historical acquisition of English by Irish speakers and the various cognitive processes involved in it: the role played by prototypes in the perception and reproduction of English possessives by Irish speakers, and the effects of the saliency and frequency of the English input on the emergent Irish English.

Abstract In addition to canonical noun incorporation, Chukchi exhibits other kinds of incorporating morphology that are consistent with polysynthesis but have seldom been considered as part of a unified morphological phenomenon. This paper examines different patterns of incorporation in Chukchi across time and asks: what are the useful loci of variation for typological comparison, how do these distinct patterns emerge diachronically, and how do these features spread in contact? I consider the existing documentation of Chukchi from the early 20th century through the present, including modern data which exhibits some novel patterns. Consistent with previous investigations of Chukchi in contact (Bogoras, 1922; de Reuse, 1994; Pupynina and Aralova, 2021), I demonstrate that the effects Chukchi has had on other languages is greater than the reverse: many morphological phenomena in Chukchi are internally-motivated and emerge from speakers’ reliance on incorporation as a discourse strategy. Specifically, I provide a unified analysis of incorporation across the nominal and verbal domains, valency-changing derivational morphology, and inflectional morphology built on the morpheme -in(e), which I argue functions as a generic underspecified noun in the language. In the realm of language contact, I propose a cline to model patterns in the borrowing of derivational phenomena like incorporation, and present shared patterns in Chukchi, Central Siberian Yupik, and Even which support this cline. Finally, I examine data from Chukchi as it is spoken today and argue that the historical linguistic ecology of northeastern Siberia has made it possible for incorporation to remain highly productive even with significant shift to Russian.

Abstract The Dolgan language is a Turkic variety, closely related to Sakha but differing from it due to contact, primarily with Evenki (Tungusic). We analyze the linguistic identity of translocal Dolgan communities in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Anabar District, which is home to a minority of the larger group of Dolgan people. Linguistically, Anabar Dolgan is best classified as a northern Sakha variety with significant lexical borrowings from Tungusic. Anabar Dolgans consider it a separate language, and see themselves as speaking Dolgan, Sakha, or a mixture of the two. Their strong sense of Dolgan identity comes from an attachment to language, culture, and territory, an identity reinforced by social ties with and ongoing migrations to and from the Taimyr Dolgan-Nenets District, home to the majority of Dolgans. Data come from sociolinguistic questionnaires, structured interviews, and linguistic elicitation with 50 respondents, and a subset of open-ended interviews.

Abstract This study addresses variation in the realization of intervocalic /b/ in the Spanish of Rivera, Uruguay, a border community that is bilingual in Portuguese and Spanish. While Spanish has one phoneme that corresponds to the graphemes ⟨b⟩ and ⟨v⟩, which is normally realized as an approximant or deleted intervocalically, Portuguese contrasts a voiced bilabial stop phoneme /b/ with a voiced labiodental fricative phoneme /v/. Sociolinguistic interviews from 40 native speakers of Riverense Spanish were analyzed acoustically using a consonant-vowel intensity ratio as a correlate of the degree of constriction in the realization of intervocalic /b/. Results indicate that speakers that use more Portuguese are more likely to contrast degree of constriction in words with Portuguese /b/ and /v/ cognates. Speakers that primarily use Spanish, on the other hand, contrast constriction based on orthography, a phenomenon that has been called “pedantic v” and “orthographic loyalty” in other Spanish varieties.

Abstract The present study uses the apparent-time construct to analyze cross-generational variability of the preverbal double negation construction (i.e., yo tampoco no voy a la fiesta ‘I’m not going to the party either’), traditionally cited as a regional characteristic of the Spanish spoken in the Basque Country. An acceptability judgment task and a semi-structured interview were carried out among four different age groups. The results show that speakers of the two older generations tend to accept and produce the regional construction significantly more than speakers of the two younger generations, who favor the Standard Spanish variant (yo tampoco voy a la fiesta ‘I’m not going to the party either’). It is suggested that this trend is mainly due to the participants’ different language contact situations (Thomason and Kaufman, 1988) and levels of formal education. Since older speakers grew up in a situation of shift via interference and with lower levels of formal education, they prefer the preverbal double negation construction, which was already a norm in the regional Spanish. However, younger speakers grew up in a language maintenance situation and have relatively high formal education levels, factors that have conditioned dialectal leveling in this case.

Abstract The article deals with the northern Swahili dialect Bajuni. It is viewed as a language peninsula rather than island, attached to neighbouring and related dialects to the south but jutting north into Somali-speaking areas. It is currently severely endangered, having been largely replaced by Somali in Somalia, and Swahili in Kenya during the late twentieth century, so it is regarded essentially as a historical language peninsula. It is treated under these headings: geography and population; history; political, sociocultural, and economic context; linguistics; regularity/complexity/stability; contact phenomena; sociolinguistics; language use and attitudes; networks.

Abstract French in Burundi offers an interesting case of language contact: speakers have Kirundi as their first language and French imported during the colonial era was the variety spoken in Belgium, which does not share all the features of reference French. In this study, we analyze a corpus of 12 speakers (including 4 women; mean age 38.5) producing different speaking styles collected according to the methodology of the Phonologie du Français Contemporain project: word reading, text reading, and free narration. The results of the pronunciation analysis concern vowels, consonants and schwa. We identify eight pronunciation features that differ from reference French. In addition, we analyze for each one the possible interferences with Kirundi or with Belgian French. In conclusion, we discuss which of these features can be considered pan-African.

Abstract In order to understand why languages become endangered, linguists must shift from documenting the last fluent speakers to documenting the larger ecology of language use in an area. The papers in this special issue all address different aspects of documenting language multilingualism. They address three related topics: (1) consideration of the state of multilingualism in endangered language ecologies; (2) tools and methods for transcribing, annotating, analyzing and presenting multilingual corpora; and (3) methods in documenting and studying language contact in process.