1. INTRODUCTION Throughout history, speakers of different languages would come into contact with one another, and language contact would take place when two or more language varieties interacted. In fact, it is the speakers of different languages who interact closely and in the course of this interaction the languages naturally influence one another. The frequency and extent of these contacts inevitably lead to the formation of stable languages. Language contact can occur as a result of migration or trade. As Gillian Sankoff notices, the nature of language contacts is created in a difficult sociohistorical ecology, as “[l]anguage contacts have, historically, taken place in large part under conditions of social inequality resulting from wars, conquests, colonialism, slavery, and migrations […]” (2003: 641). However, not all language contacts result in the creation of a new language and culture: “[l]anguage contacts have in some times and places been short-lived, with language loss and assimilation a relatively short-term result, whereas other historical situations have produced relative long-term stability and acceptance by the bi- or multilingual population” (ibidem). When two speakers of different languages come into contact, they can use a lingua franca or work out a new linguistic variety consisting of elements of the two (or more) languages they speak. The most common products of language contacts are pidgins, creoles, mixed languages and code switching. Moreover, influence on the languages may exist in different forms, such as borrowing (exchange of words) or language shift (replacement of one language by another). 1.1. RESEARCH OBJECTIVES A contemporary understanding followed by a description of the phenomenon of “languages in contact” is said to have appeared for the first time in Uriel Weinreich’s Languages in Contact, which was published in 1953. The contact linguistics perspective seems to be one of the best research tools that can be used to study Jamaican Creole because it is one of those languages that can be identified as a language of very complex histories and one that arose in the non-verbal context of a longstanding pervasive cultural contact situation, in which several fundamentally different speech communities were forced to live together in a relatively small area.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTE5NDY5MQ==