2. OVERALL FRAMEWORK OF CONTACT PHENOMENA Language change takes place due to contact. For a change to be fixed and lasting, a speaker’s individual innovation must be accepted and adopted by other speakers of the speech community.4 Sarah G. Thomason makes a division between changes that spread throughout a speech community and the process of spread, which is “a function of contact between speakers” (2003: 687). Any change in language requires an impulse from a group of people in a given area which gradually evolves and becomes an inherent part of that speech community’s language. Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes see language change initiated by the speakers as follows: [l]anguage change is typically initiated by a group of speakers in a particular locale at a given point in time, spreading from that locus outward in successive stages that reflect an apparent time depth in the spatial dispersion of forms. (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes 2003: 713) Before proceeding to the description of pidgins, creoles and the processes they undergo, it is necessary to place the contact languages in a larger domain of general contact phenomena. Studies on the contact phenomenon have been explored from many perspectives, e.g. anthropological and ethnographical, where cultural and linguistic data were collected in the form of publications containing the songs, stories or legends of a given community (e.g. Beckwith 1930; Tanna 1984). Before 1960, contact linguistics was rather an off-road field of study which only gained full-fledged status after the conference at the University in Mona (Jamaica) took place in 1960. Most of the pioneer basic research comes from the 1960s and 1970s. Authors such as Holmes and Sebba (1997) also largely contributed to building the foundations of contact linguistics studies. The research studies that followed focused on presenting both pidgin and creole grammar. One of the contemporary authors investigating the contact phenomenon has been Thomason (2008), who has dealt with how to distinguish between different types of contact languages and how to tell whether a language is a pidgin or already a creole 4 See Bloomfield (1933: 42–57).
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