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date: 17 February 2020

Abstract and Keywords

A major reason for language endangerment is intensive contact with another group whose language has gained, or is gaining, greater political, social and economic prestige and advantages. Speakers of an endangered language will gradually lose the capacity to fully communicate in the language, and fully understand it. As a consequence, an endangered language will gradually become obsolescent. The process of language obsolescence ultimately leads to language shift and language loss. The impact of the increasingly dominant language onto an endangered language tends to involve a massive influx of non-native forms from the dominant language; a high amount of structural diffusion; reinforcement of forms and patterns shared with the dominant language; and the loss of forms or patterns absent from the dominant language. Language endangerment and impending language shift may result in dialect leveling, and creating new mixed, or ‘blended’ languages. A major difference between contact-induced language change in ‘healthy’ and in endangered languages lies in the speed of change. A high degree of individual variation between speakers and disintegration of language communities result in the lack of continuity and stability of linguistic change.

Keywords: borrowing, endangerment, obsolescence, merged dialect, blended language, negative borrowing

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Australian Laureate Fellow, Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre in the College of Art, Society and Education and the Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Australia. She is an expert on languages and cultures of Amazonia and the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, in addition to linguistic typology, general linguistics, and a few other areas. Her major publications include grammars of Bare (1995), Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (Cambridge University Press, 2003), in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American languages. Her other major publications, with Oxford University Press, include Classifiers: A Typology of Noun Categorization Devices (2000), Language Contact in Amazonia (2002), Evidentiality (2004), The Manambu Language from East Sepik, Papua New Guinea, (2008), Imperatives and Commands (2010), Languages of the Amazon (2012), The Art of Grammar (2015), and How Gender Shapes the World (2016). She is the editor of numerous books, among them The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and co-editor, with R. M. W. Dixon, of The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology (Cambridge University Press).

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