The History Of Multilingualism

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Recommended: An Essay About Code Switching

Introduction Language contact seems to embody various types or varieties of languages in that it comes when two or more languages or varieties interact. Language contact study is called contact linguistics. Multilingualism has been common throughout much of human history, today most people in the world are multilingual. Anytime speakers of different languages interact closely; it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Language contact comes about between adstratum languages, or as the result of migration, with an intrusive language acting as either a superstratum or a substratum. It occurs in a variety of phenomena, including language convergence, borrowing and relexification. The most common products are pidgins, creoles, code-switching, and mixed languages. Other hybrid languages, such as English, do not strictly fit into any of these categories. Multilingualism …show more content…

Thus, code-switching is the use of more than one linguistic variety in a manner consistent with phonology and syntax of each variety (Per Larsen, 2015). It’s distinct from other language contact phenomena, such as borrowing, pidgins and creoles. Borrowing affects the lexicon, the words that make up a language, while code-switching takes place in individual utterances. Speakers establish a pidgin language when two or more speakers who do not speak a common language form an intermediate, third language. On the other hand, speakers practice code-switching when they are each fluent in both languages. Code mixing is a thematically related term, but the usage of the terms code-switching and code-mixing varies. Some scholars use either term to denote the same practice, while others apply code-mixing to denote the formal linguistic properties of language-contact phenomena, and code-switching to denote the actual, spoken usages by multilingual

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