5.09.2006

Beyond Spanglish

Arrogant Polyglot was discussing the direction of language in the U.S., and when I said that there should be a unifying language, he said:

My prediction is that this unifying language will take the form of a new code, the result of several generations of increasing English-Spanish contact. Something so much more advanced than code switching or Spanglish.

I have never thought about that. Sort of like an advanced creole. I'm too tired to think more deeply about it, but it's quite linguistic. :)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Language contact is a powerful thing. For instance, after so many years of contact with Norman French, one could hardly say that English was then or is now a creole.

Anonymous said...

True. Isn't creole really just a few steps beyond pidgeon? Then the language gets solidified, I think. I'm not in school at the moment and don't read linguistic theory for fun, so I'm not sure. :)

Balfegor said...

after so many years of contact with Norman French, one could hardly say that English was then or is now a creole.

Isn't that a matter of the particular conditions of Norman occupation, rather than any problem of time? Under the Normans, my impression (though I am not an historian) is that the natives continued to speak their native language, but that language was gradually shaped by massive borrowing from Norman French, and perhaps some grammatical bleed as well. English would then have too much input from the original native language to be a "creole" in the sense that Tok Pisin or Hawaiian Pidgin are/were. There might have been a comparable pidgin and even creole that emerged in that time, due to interactions between the natives and the Normans, but it's not clear to me (though I could be wrong) that English is derived from that pidgin, as a creole would have been.

Anonymous said...

I like that term you used: "grammatical bleed."

But the more important question is how the heck you're able to blog in Japanese!