Contributions from an international team of experts revisit and update the concept of linguistic ecology in order to critically examine current theoretical approaches to language contact. Language is understood as a part of complex socio-historical-cultural systems, and interaction between the different dimensions and levels of these systems is considered to be essential for specific language forms. This book presents a uniform, abstract model of linguistic ecology based on, among other things, two concepts of Edmund Husserl's philosophy. It considers the individual (...) speaker in the specific communication situation to be the essential heuristic basis of linguistic analysis. The chapters present and employ a new, transparent and accessible contact linguistic vocabulary to aid reader comprehension, and explore a wide range of language contact situations in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific. This book will be fascinating reading for students and researchers across contact linguistics and cultural studies. (shrink)

Pidgin languages are special reduced interlingual systems of communication created by the need to communicate between speakers of two or more different languages. They originate to fulfil certain communicative requirements, adapt to changes in these requirements, and disappear once they are no longer needed, for pidgin, by definition, are second languages, used by adults and not transmitted (except in the exceptional case of creolization) to a new generation of children. Pidgin languages are found in all parts of the world where (...) trade, warfare, colonialism or tourism has brought members of different speech communities into contact. The lifespan of some is no greater than the length of a summer holiday, others, such as Chinese Pidgin English, remained in existence for more than a century. Whilst for a long time pidgins were put in the category of “marginal languages” and their study correspondingly marginalized, in the most recent past, pidgin studies has become a fast growing and very respectable subfield of modern linguistics. The love-hate relationship which linguists, and indeed educators, historians and others, have had with pidgin languages centres around what I am inclined to regard as their single most important characteristic: their changeability. Pidgins, can be called the chameleons of the world's languages; they grow and contract with communicative requirements, they change their lexical composition to reflect the relative power of communicants, they change their speakers, and their geographical location and to their users look very similar to their own first languages. (shrink)