Borrowing

One of the most common ways that languages influence each other is the exchange of words. This is called borrowing. Borrowing is different from code-mixing that it is usually only a word or phrase and the user of the borrowed word or phrase does not have to know the language it is borrowed from. For example, in English we have many borrowed words and phrases that most English speakers know from other languages:

Debris (French)

Restaurant (French)

Macho (Spanish) –also in Russian

Karaoke (Japanese) –also in Russian and at Express ayut on Fridays?

Much is made about the contemporary borrowing of English words into other languages, but this phenomenon is not new, nor is it even very large by historical standards. The large-scale importation of words from Latin, French and other languages into English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was more significant. Some languages have borrowed so much that they have become scarcely recognizable.

Armenian is a good example of this. It borrowed so many words from Iranian languages that it was at first considered a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, and was not recognized as an independent branch of the Indo-European languages for many decades.

Languages collide

Now that we have discussed speech communities where people are multilingual, let’s turn our attention to an earlier moment, where people who do not know each other’s languages meet. If two people do not share a language in common how will they communicate? Obviously people who do not speak the same language will have difficulty communicating, but people need to communicate—don’t they?

**ASK CLASS: BRAINSTORM Why do people have to communicate?

[to do business with each other, to establish political relationships]

So, people will inevitably speak to one another, but how?

What happens when two completely different languages meet?

Pidgins

There is yet another way in which two languages can become mixed together. When people from two different languages do not understand each other, that is they are not MUTUALLY INTELLIGIBLE with each other but people want to communicate—they need to create a common code.

What they usually create is a brand-new variety out of the two existing languages. They adopt something from one language and something from another to create something new.

Slide 5: pidgin

This is called a Pidgin language:

PIDGIN: a language made up of two or more languages, used as a way of communicating by people whose first languages are different from each other.

These are varieties created for the very practical and immediate purposes of communication between people who otherwise would have no common language whatsoever. They are learned by one person from another within the communities concerned as the accepted way of communicating with members of the other community. Again, these are usually languages created for the purposes of trade.

Slide 5.5 and slide 6

The requirements of a Pidgin are:

1. The language is specially constructed by its users to suit the needs of its users. So if it is for trading in cattle, there will be few words for discussing anything else, like the weather, or vegetables, or your favorite painter.

2. It should be as simple and easy to learn as possible.

3. The vocabulary is usually based on the vocabulary of the dominant group—wherever people are speaking the pidgin.

4. It is a compromise language between the language of one group and the other in some way, whether its grammar from one vocabulary from the other, or a mix of both of these.

SLIDE 7: RUNGLISH

RUNGLISH

One example of this is “Runglish” If we take it as a term for describing a Russian-English pidgin language, it was popularized in 2000, when the language aboard the International Space Station was described as "Runglish". Runglish is in fact also spoken in a number of English-Russian communities, most notably the Russian-speaking Jewish community of Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, New York.

SLIDE 8: CREOLES

CREOLES

Now, when a pidgin becomes so popular that it begins to have native speakers, people begin to teach their children the language, it’s vocabulary expands, and it gradually becomes the dominant language of communication it is called a Creole.

Creole: A language that is a mixture of two or more other languages and is spoken as the FIRST language of a people.

SLIDE 8.5: CREOLE DIAGRAM

The process of a Creole becoming its own language is called Creolization.

MAP OF U.S.A

SLIDE 9: CREOLES AND U.S. HISTORY

Creoles are interesting for the social-historical information they provide about their speakers. The majority of Creoles now in existence, in fact, are usually a mix of ENGLISH and another variety. This is especially true of Creoles in and around the continent of North America. There are a number of Creoles spoken in the U.S. In particular, along the coast of South Carolina (south eastern U.S) is a Creole called Gullah which is spoken primarily by African American descendants of slaves. In Louisiana (southern U.S.), French Creole is a mixture between French and English and spoken by a diverse set of people. Finally, Hawaiian Creole, spoken in Hawaii is a mix of the indigenous Hawaiian language and English.