Language Contact and Language Attrition

Abstract

This chapter focuses on language contact phenomena typical in language attrition processes. It starts from the assumption that language contact is a bilingual practice reflecting the processing/use of language in a bilingual speaker’s repertoire. Defining key terms such as borrowing, transference, and convergence, the chapter addresses typical language contact phenomena in various language attrition settings such as lexical transference, processes of semantical restructuring, syntactic transference/convergence, morphological/phonological transfer. The chapter discusses aspects of pragmatic convergence, that is, the adoption of L2-discourse marking systems. It demonstrates that despite much individual variation there are some phenomena which typically occur in different speakers and different communities of attriters independently, that is, L1 lexemes adopting L2 meaning, instances of pivot matching, and the adoption of turn-related discourse markers. Finally, the impact of external factors, such as language awareness, attitude, and norm-orientation in bilingual communities that explain individual differences in attriters, is discussed.