Advances in mixed language phonology: An overview of three case studies

Mixed languages have provided a fascinating platform for linguistic inquiry for the better part of four decades when initial works began to appear in the literature. From the 1990s to approximately the mid-2000s, interest in the mixed language debate peaked with a number of influential publications that aspired to make sense of this rare linguistic phenomenon. This research laid the foundation for numerous theoretical, empirical, and descriptive works that continue to refine what it means to be a “mixed language” and the importance of these languages in understanding language contact and language genesis. Nearly all studies involving inquiries into mixed languages centre on theoretical, empirical, or descriptive accounts of higher-level phenomena involving the mixing of lexicon, morphosyntax, semantics, in addition to socio-cultural phenomena that give rise to such extreme language mixing. However, beyond basic descriptions based primarily on impressionistic observations, one area of mixed language research that has been largely overlooked is that of phonology, and of greater theoretical interest, the phonetic repercussions of amalgamating two or more sound systems into a single language. Mixed languages are unlike creoles and other forms of language contact in that they are created for expressive purposes rather than out of communicative need. This is because the originators of mixed languages are already proficient bilinguals in the source languages. This fact raises a number of questions regarding how phonological material is arranged in the mixed language as the originators likely had some degree of proficiency in both source sound systems; unlike the originators of creole languages who are often only proficient in one. This chapter provides a synopsis of the advances in mixed language phonology over the last decade based on three case studies involving Media Lengua, Gurindji Kriol, and Michif that have used empirical research involving acoustic measurements and psycholinguistic perception experiments.