A model of contact-induced language change: Testing the role of second language speakers in the evolution of Mozambican Portuguese

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Abstract

Language change is accelerated by language contact, especially by contact that occurs when a group of speakers shifts from one language to another. This has commonly been explained by linguistic innovation occurring during second language acquisition. This hypothesis is based on historical reconstructions of instances of contact and has not been formally tested on empirical data. In this paper, we construct an agent-based model to formalize the hypothesis that second language speakers are responsible for accelerated language change during language shift. We compare model predictions to a unique combination of diachronic linguistic and demographic data from Maputu, Mozambique. The model correctly predicts an increased proportional use of the novel linguistic variants during the period we study. We find that a modified version of the model is a better fit to one of our two datasets and discuss plausible reasons for this. As a general conclusion concerning typological differences between contact-induced and non-contact-induced language change, we suggest that multiple introductions of a new linguistic variant by different individuals may be the mechanism by which language contact accelerates language change.

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Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure

Gary Lupyan, Rick Dale (2010)

Background Languages differ greatly both in their syntactic and morphological systems and in the social environments in which they exist. We challenge the view that language grammars are unrelated to social environments in which they are learned and used. Methodology/Principal Findings We conducted a statistical analysis of >2,000 languages using a combination of demographic sources and the World Atlas of Language Structures— a database of structural language properties. We found strong relationships between linguistic factors related to morphological complexity, and demographic/socio-historical factors such as the number of language users, geographic spread, and degree of language contact. The analyses suggest that languages spoken by large groups have simpler inflectional morphology than languages spoken by smaller groups as measured on a variety of factors such as case systems and complexity of conjugations. Additionally, languages spoken by large groups are much more likely to use lexical strategies in place of inflectional morphology to encode evidentiality, negation, aspect, and possession. Our findings indicate that just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used. As adults learn a language, features that are difficult for them to acquire, are less likely to be passed on to subsequent learners. Languages used for communication in large groups that include adult learners appear to have been subjected to such selection. Conversely, the morphological complexity common to languages used in small groups increases redundancy which may facilitate language learning by infants. Conclusions/Significance We hypothesize that language structures are subjected to different evolutionary pressures in different social environments. Just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used. The proposed Linguistic Niche Hypothesis has implications for answering the broad question of why languages differ in the way they do and makes empirical predictions regarding language acquisition capacities of children versus adults.

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Spontaneous evolution of linguistic structure-an iterated learning model of the emergence of regularity and irregularity

Russell S Kirby (2001)

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Age and Rate of Acquisition of Second Language for Academic Purposes

Virginia Collier (1987)

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Author and article information

Contributors

Anna Jon-And: Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: ResourcesRole: ValidationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing

Elliot Aguilar:

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3736-2243

Role: ConceptualizationRole: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: SoftwareRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing

Nicholas Greatorex Riches: Role: Editor

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): PLoS One

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): PLoS ONE

Journal ID (publisher-id): plos

Journal ID (pmc): plosone

Title: PLoS ONE

Publisher: Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )

ISSN (Electronic): 1932-6203

Publication date Collection: 2019

Publication date (Electronic): 25 April 2019

Volume: 14

Issue: 4

Electronic Location Identifier: e0212303

Affiliations

[1 ] Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

[2 ] School of Humanities and Media Studies, Dalarna University, Falun, Sweden

[3 ] Dept. of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States of America

Newcastle University Institute for Health and Society, UNITED KINGDOM

Author notes

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

* E-mail: ajd@ 123456du.se

Author information

Elliot Aguilar http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3736-2243

Article

Publisher ID: PONE-D-17-41580

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0212303

PMC ID: 6483184

PubMed ID: 31022194

SO-VID: 261f7985-3306-461e-be45-5cd7bf71e3c2

License:

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

History

Date received : 5 December 2017

Date accepted : 31 January 2019

Page count

Figures: 3, Tables: 2, Pages: 14

Funding

Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000076, Directorate for Biological Sciences;

Award ID: NSF 17-1

Award Recipient :

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3736-2243

Elliot Aguilar

This work was supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, Directorate for Biological Sciences 17-1 to EA and by the Nordic Research Opportunity grant. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Data Availability An excel file containing data that underlies our statistical analysis, with occurrences of conservative and novel variant per participant in both datasets, is enclosed as a supporting information file. The file also contains excerpts from transcriptions for each data point. Recordings or transcriptions may not be published due to legal restrictions. The 1993-94 data set is owned by Perpétua Gonçalves at University Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique, who directed the collection of these data in Mozambique. We have been granted full access to data but have no permission from the owner or the participants to publish them. Requests regarding the 1993-1994 data set (generally referred to as PPOM) may be sent directly to Perpétua Gonçalves at ( perpetuagoncalves@ 123456yahoo.com ). The 2007 data set was collected by one of the authors (Anna Jon-And) while employed as a PhD student at Stockholm University. Data collected within the frames of research projects by Swedish university employees belongs to the employing institution. Stockholm University is thus owner of this data set. Swedish law has implemented the EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation, https://gdpr-info.eu/). The policy of Stockholm University is a strict application of this law, implying that no personal data concerning living persons may be published or shared without full consent from the person, independently of having sensitive content or not. We do not have such consent from participants. Recorded interviews are considered personal data as the participant may be identified by their voice or by information in the interviews, which contain conversations about their home neighbourhood, about their family and about their life history. Details on Stockholm University’s GDPR policies may be found here: https://issuu.com/stockholmsuniversitet/docs/gdpr-folder_f_r_prefekteradm_chefer Data requests concerning the 2007 set collected by Anna Jon-And may be sent to the department for archives and records at Stockholm University ( registrator@ 123456su.se ), where the contact person for this data set is Margareta Backman Ödmark ( margareta.odmark@ 123456su.se ).

A model of contact-induced language change: Testing the role of second language speakers in the evolution of Mozambican Portuguese

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Most cited references 19

Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure

Spontaneous evolution of linguistic structure-an iterated learning model of the emergence of regularity and irregularity

Age and Rate of Acquisition of Second Language for Academic Purposes

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