Language Contact

Language contact occurs when two or more languages or varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics.

Multilingualism has likely been common throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual. In tribal hunter-gatherer societies, multilingualism was common, as tribes must communicate with neighboring peoples and there is often intermarriage. In present-day areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa, where there is much variation in language over short distances, it is usual for anyone who has dealings outside their own town or village to know two or more languages.

When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Languages normally develop by gradually accumulating dialectal differences until two dialects cease to be mutually intelligible, somewhat analogous to the species barrier in biology. Language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum languages, or as the result of migration, with an intrusive language acting as either a superstratum or a substratum.

Language contact occurs in a variety of phenomena, including language convergence, borrowing, and relexification. The most common products are pidgins, creoles, code-switching, and mixed languages. Other hybrid languages, such as English, do not strictly fit into any of these categories.