Language Evolution: Contact, Competition and Change / Edition 1

by Salikoko S. Mufwene

Overview

Languages are constantly changing. New words are added to the English language every year, either borrowed or coined, and there is often railing against the 'decline' of the language by public figures. Some languages, such as French and Finnish, have academies to protect them against foreign imports. Yet languages are species-like constructs, which evolve naturally over time. Migration, imperialism, and globalization have blurred boundaries between many of them, producing new ones (such as creoles) and driving some to extinction.
This book examines the processes by which languages change, from the macroecological perspective of competition and natural selection. In a series of chapters, Salikoko Mufwene examines such themes as:

-        natural selection in language

-        the actuation question and the invisible hand that drives evolution

-        multilingualism and language contact

-        language birth and language death

-        the emergence of Creoles and Pidgins

-        the varying impacts of colonization and globalization on language vitality

This comprehensive examination of the organic evolution of language will be essential reading for graduate and senior undergraduate students, and for researchers on the social dynamics of language variation and change, language vitality and death, and even the origins of linguistic diversity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826493699
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	05/31/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Salikoko S. Mufwene is the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics as well as Professor on the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago, USA.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction I: Population Dynamics and Language Evolution 2. Language evolution: The population genetics way3. Population movements, contacts, competition, selection, and language evolution 4. How population-wide patterns emerge in language evolution: A comparison with highway traffic5. What do creoles and pidgins tell us about the evolution of language? 6. Race, racialism, and the study of language evolution in America II: Competition, Selection, And the Development of Creoles 7. Competition and selection in language evolution 8. Transfer and the substrate hypothesis in creolistics 9. Grammaticization and the development of creoles 10. Multilingualism in linguistic history III: Globalization And Language Vitality 11. Language birth and death 12. Globalization and the myth of killer languages: What's really going on? 13. Myths of globalization: What African demolinguistics reveals 14. A Case Study: The ecology of Gullah's survival Conclusions Bibliography
Index