Bilingualism and Structural Change in Burma and the Reef Islands

Journal of Language Contact 4 (2011) 217–249 brill.nl/jlc Who changes language? Bilingualism and structural change in Burma and the Reef Islands Åshild Næss and Mathias Jenny University of Zürich [email protected] [email protected] Abstract In this paper we discuss two cases of contact-induced language change where lexical and gram- matical borrowing appear to have gone in opposite directions: one language has borrowed large amounts of vocabulary from another while at the same time being the source of structural borrowings into the other language. Furthermore, it appears in both cases that the structural borrowing has come about through bilingualism in L1 speakers of the source language, while L1 speakers of the language undergoing the structural change are largely monolingual. We propose that these two unusual factors are not unrelated, but that the latter is the cause of the former: Under circumstances where the numerically much smaller language in a contact situation is the contact language, the L2 speakers’ variety, influenced by their L1, may spread into the monolingual community. The lexical borrowing naturally happens from the bilingual speakers’ L2 into their L1, resulting in opposite directions of lexical and structural borrowing. Similar processes have been described in cases of language shift, but we show that it may take place even in situations where shift does not occur. Keywords structural borrowing ; lexical borrowing ; imposition; bilingualism; Mon; Burmese ; Äiwoo ; Vaeakau-Taumako 1. Introduction The literature on contact-induced language change makes two assumptions about what we will refer to as structural borrowing, i.e. transfer of grammati- cal structure from one language in a contact situation (which we will call the source language) to another (the recipient language) 1 . The first assumption is 1 We are aware of the frequently-made distinction between borrowing as coming about through agentivity on the part of speakers of the recipient language and imposition as being brought about through agentivity on the part of source language speakers (Van Coetsem 1988 ). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI 10.1163/187740911X589253 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 10:05:41PM via free access 218 Å. Næss and M. Jenny / Journal of Language Contact 4 (2011) 217–249 that structural borrowing comes about through bilingualism in L1 speakers of the recipient language. That is, a speech community has a second language which it uses as an intergroup language, and structural borrowing consists of the adaptation of the group’s first or emblematic language to structural pat- terns of the intergroup language (e.g. Ross, 1996 , 2003 , Thomason, 2001 : 78, Heine and Kuteva, 2005 : 13). The second assumption is that structural borrowing is the endpoint of a process which starts with lexical borrowing; that is, that structural borrowing does not take place independently of lexical borrowing. While counterexam- ples to this claim are well known, and it is not adopted by all researchers in the field (e.g. Aikhenvald, 2006), it is nevertheless widely considered to hold as a general principle (e.g. Thomason, 2001 : 96). This paper will present two case studies of contact situations where neither of these conditions hold: Mon and Burmese in southern Burma, and Äiwoo and Vaeakau-Taumako in the Reef Islands group in the Solomon Islands. In both these cases, structural borrowing seems to have come about through bilingualism among speakers of the source language (Mon and Äiwoo), not the recipient language, and lexical and structural borrowing appear to have gone in opposite directions, with one language being at the same time the source of the lexical borrowings and the recipient of the structural borrowings, and vice versa. We will argue that these apparent exceptionalities share a common cause, namely the diffusion of the L2 variety spoken by a numerically superior bilingual community into a community of potentially monolingual speakers of the recipient language. As a source of structural borrowing, this situation has occasionally been mentioned in the literature, but generally in the context of language shift. We show, however, that shift is not a necessary consequence of such a situation, and that stable situations may occur in which the language of monolingual speakers is influenced by the L2 variety of a numerically superior bilingual group. 2. Mon and Burmese in southern Burma 2.1 The languages and their history Mon and Burmese share at least one millennium of common history. Apart from the earliest Mon inscriptions, dating from the 6th century CE onwards By this definition the changes we describe are clearly an instance of imposition rather than borrowing. However, we have found it useful for the purposes of discussion to retain “borrowing” as a general term for change occurring in one language on the model of another, regardless of the exact mechanisms by which this takes place. Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 10:05:41PM via free access Å. Næss and M. Jenny / Journal of Language Contact 4 (2011) 217–249 219 in the Chao Phraya valley (now central Thailand), all documented stages of Mon are potentially subject to interference from Burmese. The pre-Burmese inscriptions in Old Mon are all rather short and do not offer much insight into the structure of the language. The bulk of Old Mon language material was produced in the Burmese kingdom of Pagán, where Mon was obviously a prestige language of the court for some decades. Burmese inscriptions do not appear until a few decades after the first Mon inscriptions in Pagán in the 11th century. While Mon was an important literary language in Pagán, it was probably not spoken there by large segments of the population, which was Burmese rather than Mon. Mon was the vernacular spoken in lower Burma all the way down to the Malay peninsula and the Irrawaddy Delta, intermingled from early times with communities speaking Karen varieties and Burmese dialects such as Tavoyan and Merguese. After the (final) fall of the independent Mon kingdom centred at Pegu in 1757, the status of Burmese as a language of official and commercial communication was reinforced, pushing back Mon to mere vernacular status of the villages and home communication. Substantial numbers of original Mon speakers shifted to monolingualism in Burmese, while Mon continues to be the native language of a population of some 900,000 in Burma, and much fewer (probably no more than 50 000) in old migrant communities in central Thailand. Almost all Mon speakers today are bilingual, speaking also Burmese or Thai. 2.2 General structural properties of Mon and Burmese Mon and Burmese belong to two unrelated language families, namely Austro- Asiatic in the case of Mon and Tibeto-Burman in the case of Burmese. The two languages differ greatly in many aspects of their linguistic systems, both on the phonological and morphosyntactic level. Unlike its neighbouring languages, Mon is not a tonal language but has two distinct registers, that is normal or clear versus breathy phonation, in some cases accompanied by differences in vowel quality. This makes for a rich inven- tory of vowels and diphthongs, though without a phonemic length distinction. Words in Mon are mostly mono- or sesquisyllabic, that is consisting of a weak syllable with reduced phonological possibilities (restricted set of initials, no register distinction, no final consonant, only ə as vowel) followed by a full syllable. The basic stress pattern is phrase final. Traces of old morphological processes, consisting of pre- and infixes, are still present in modern Mon, though hardly any of these processes are still productive. The only truly productive affix seems to be the “universal prefix” h ə- which marks a derived form of some kind, usually deverbal, but with no specific meaning covering all instances. Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 10:05:41PM via free access 220 Å. Næss and M. Jenny / Journal of Language Contact 4 (2011) 217–249 Word order in Mon is basically SVO, with prepositions, modifiers following modified and subordinate clause following main clause with a clause initial subordinator. Numeral classifiers, though officially present in the language, are hardly used except for some contexts in literary style. The arrangement of elements in numeral expressions is noun - numeral (- classifier) for common nouns, as in ka mùə ‘one car’ and numeral - noun for measure words, including expressions of time, distance, etc., as in mù ə hnam ‘one year’. Mon makes regular use of secondary verbs or verb serialization to modify the meaning of a main verb in terms of direction, aspectuality, manner, and others. Serial verbs in Mon are of the root or nuclear type, with all verbs adjacent to each other and the arguments following. In directional secondary verbs, Mon regularly distinguishes between basic and causative forms, the latter being used whenever the object is affected in such a way that it moves in space. Burmese distinguishes three (four according to some authors) tones, some with a phonation (register-like) component. Words are mostly monosyllabic, though a fair number of polysyllabic words (not compounds) occur. The main stress usually falls on the final syllable of a word or phrase, with a marked lower ing of the pitch on the final syllable of a finite clause. Two fossilized morphological processes can be observed in Burmese, namely aspiration of the initial consonant in causative verbs and the voicing of the initial consonant of a verb to form a noun. In addition there are two (semi)productive processes, namely the prefix ʔə- which forms deverbal nouns and adjectives, and the “induced creaky tone”, that is, a change of the tone on the final syllable of an expression to mark an attributive or otherwise dependent form.

Load more