Written Afrikaans since Standardization

Written Afrikaans since Standardization
Author: Johanita Kirsten
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2019-02-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1498577210

This book focuses on a century of language change, starting early in the 20th century when Standard Afrikaans first emerged. Different areas of language use are explored, such as pronoun use, tenses, possession, and connectives. The changes in these areas are divided into three categories of types of change: paradigmatic changes, grammaticalization, and discursive and socio-cultural changes. The book also includes a short history of the standardization of Afrikaans and brief discussions of some relevant ideological issues. The second and final chapters include an in-depth discussion of the theory of language change and language evolution, as well as reflections on what language change is and how it proceeds. The role of language contact in language change, and language-external influences, are also considered.

Afrikaans Linguistics

Afrikaans Linguistics
Author: WAM Carstens
Publisher: African Sun Media
Total Pages: 734
Release: 2024-10-03
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1991260520

Offering a contemporary exploration of the multifaceted landscape of Afrikaans linguistics, Afrikaans Linguistics: Contemporary Perspectives marks a seminal contribution to the field. This volume, for the first time, presents accessible insights into diverse linguistics subdisciplines, inviting international scholars to familiarise themselves with Afrikaans language studies. Throughout much of the late 19th and 20th centuries, Afrikaans scholars predominantly communicated in Afrikaans, resulting in a significant gap in the dissemination of knowledge about the language. The chapters in this book, written by prominent South Africans, as well as international scholars working in the field of Afrikaans, serve as a pivotal bridge, by providing essential historical context while also paying attention to the development of Afrikaans linguistics during the 20th century. The primary focus remains on illuminating 21st century research trajectories, offering a comprehensive snapshot of contemporary scholarship in Afrikaans linguistics.

Constructions in Contact 2

Constructions in Contact 2
Author: Hans C. Boas
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027259976

The last few years have seen a steadily increasing interest in constructional approaches to language contact. This volume builds on previous constructionist work, in particular Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) and the volume Constructions in Contact (2018) and extends its methodology and insights in three major ways. First, it presents new constructional research on a wide range of language contact scenarios including Afrikaans, American Sign Language, English, French, Malayalam, Norwegian, Spanish, Welsh, as well as contact scenarios that involve typologically different languages. Second, it also addresses other types of scenarios that do not fall into the classic language contact category, such as multilingual practices and language acquisition as emerging multilingualism. Third, it aims to integrate constructionist views on language contact and multilingualism with other approaches that focus on structural, social, and cognitive aspects. The volume demonstrates that Construction Grammar is a framework particularly well suited for analyzing a wide variety of language contact phenomena from a usage-based perspective.

Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings

Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings
Author: Bertus van Rooy
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2024-07-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027246963

Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings explores an innovative proposal: that linguistic similarities identified in different forms of contact-influenced varieties of language use (including translation, native and non-native varieties of English, and language use of bilinguals more generally) can be accounted for in a coherent framework grounded in the notion of ‘constrained communication’. These varieties have hitherto been studied in independent scholarly traditions, especially translation studies and world Englishes, leaving the potential underlying unity underexplored, both conceptually and empirically. The chapters collected in this volume aim to develop such a unified perspective by drawing on corpus data across a range of languages and language varieties, with a focus on written language, a neglected data source in research on multilingual contact settings. The findings point to shared general characteristics across individual contact settings, which result from (probabilistically conditioned) manifestations of the same deeper regularities – constraints – present in diverse language-contact settings.

Language Standardization and Language Change

Language Standardization and Language Change
Author: Ana Deumert
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027218575

Language Standardization and Language Change describes the formation of an early standard norm at the Cape around 1900. The processes of variant reduction and sociolinguistic focusing which accompanied the early standardization history of Afrikaans (or 'Cape Dutch' as it was then called) are analysed within the broad methodological framework of corpus linguistics and variation analysis. Multivariate statistical techniques (cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling and PCA) are used to model the emergence of linguistic uniformity in the Cape Dutch speech community. The book also examines language contact and creolization in the early settlement, the role of Afrikaner nationalism in shaping language attitudes and linguistic practices, and the influence of English. As a case study in historical sociolinguistics the book calls into question the traditional view of the emergence of an Afrikaans standard norm, and advocates a strongly sociolinguistic, speaker-orientated approach to language history in general, and standardization studies in particular.

Standardization

Standardization
Author: Andrew R. Linn
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2002-12-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027283672

This volume presents fourteen case studies of standardization processes in eleven different Germanic languages. Together, the contributions confront problematic issues in standardization which will be of interest to sociolinguists, as well as to historical linguists from all language disciplines. The papers cover a historical range from the Middle Ages to the present and a geographical range from South Africa to Iceland, but all fall into one of the following categories: 1) shaping and diffusing a standard language; 2) the relationship between standard and identity; 3) non-standardization, de-standardization and re-standardization.

The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization

The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization
Author: Wendy Ayres-Bennett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1013
Release: 2021-07-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108640079

Surveying a wide range of languages and approaches, this Handbook is an essential resource for all those interested in language standards and standard languages. It not only explores the standardization of national European languages, it also offers fresh insights on the standardization of minoritized, indigenous and stateless languages.

Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages

Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages
Author: Nils Langer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2011-12-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110901358

Purism is an aspect of linguistic study which appeals not only to the scholar but also to the layperson. Somehow, ordinary speakers with many different mother tongues and with no formal training in linguistics share certain beliefs about what language is, how it develops or should develop, whether it has good or bad qualities, etc. The topic of linguistic purism in its many realisations is the subject of this volume of 19 articles selected from the contributions presented at a conference at the University of Bristol in 2003. In particular, the articles deal with the relationship of purism to historical prescriptivism, e.g. the influence of grammarians in the 17th and 18th centuries, to nationhood, e.g. the instrumentalising of purism in the standardisation of Afrikaans or Luxembourgish, to modern society, e.g. the existence of puristic tendencies in computer chatrooms, to folk linguistics, e.g. lay perceptions of different varieties of English, and to academic linguistics, e.g. the presence of puristic notions in the historiography of German or English.

Creolization and Pidginization in Contexts of Postcolonial Diversity

Creolization and Pidginization in Contexts of Postcolonial Diversity
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2018-02-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004363394

This book deals with creolization and pidginization of language, culture and identity and makes use of interdisciplinary approaches developed in the study of the latter. Creolization and pidginization are conceptualized and investigated as specific social processes in the course of which new common languages, socio-cultural practices and identifications are developed under distinct social and political conditions and in different historical and local contexts of diversity. The contributions show that creolization and pidginization are important strategies to deal with identity and difference in a world in which diversity is closely linked with inequalities that relate to specific group memberships, colonial legacies and social norms and values.