20 Jamaican Creole Proverbs from the Perspective of Contact Linguistics contact-induced changes. When a speaker uses a second language, he/she may insert material from his/her first language if he/she does not know how to express a concept. This type of substitution is called the “gap-filling approach.” The speaker may transfer certain structural elements onto the second language. An example may be the case of English people who use the SVO word order in German subordinate clauses which have the SOV word order (Thomason 2003: 700). D e l i b e r a t e D e c i s i o n – language change may be induced or introduced deliberately; an example of this kind of language change is the conscious adoption of loanwords. The motif of deliberate change may serve to emphasize the membership of a particular group or speech community or the desire to differ from another group in the community and to become unintelligible to outsiders (Bisang 2006: 91). An example given by Maarten Mous (1994: 199, quoted in Thomason 2003: 703) concerns the speakers of Ma’a, who introduced the voiceless lateral fricative into Bantu words to make their speech less Bantu-like in order to underline their autonomy. Deliberately changed languages may serve as an attempt to underscore ethnic separation. Gregory Guy indicates that “[…] all speech communities and all speakers regularly and easily use and manipulate linguistic variables and variable processes” (2003: 370). The outcomes of these manipulations are lexical and syntactical changes. Thomason gives the example of Pig Latin, a secret language with a deliberately distorted phonological system. It seems that most of the deliberate changes are made by the members of speech communities in order to mark their group identity and to express their individuality. 2.2. LANGUAGE LOSS/DEATH MECHANISMS A language may cease to exist in several different ways. It may happen through attrition, grammatical replacement and a state of language that I would call changelessness (i.e. no change at all). A t t r i t i o n is a gradual process in which a language recedes as it loses speakers, domains and, ultimately, structure; it is a loss of linguistic material that is not replaced by new material (for instance, by material borrowed from the dominant group’s language) (Thomason 2001: 227; quoted in Chruszczewski 2006: 59). Thomason writes of a lexicon which “is lost when a language is excluded from domains where it used to be employed, such as religion. Lexicon is also lost when assimilation eliminates former cultural practices in
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTE5NDY5MQ==