Social factors

I use ‘social factors’ as a cover term for a set of interdependent characteristics relating to economic structure, political participation and social organization, demographic distribution and ideological superstructure within a society. Contact ecologies and outcomes may be construed as intersecting spaces along a continuum. On one end, economically and politically more egalitarian linguistic ecologies create the conditions for the early acquisition of multiple languages. Balanced child and adult multilingualism, gradual population growth and modest mobility favour language maintenance, long-term structural accommodation and cumulative change, and the emergence of linguistic areas. This may be supported by fluid ethnolinguistic identities, exogamy, and dense and multiplex social networks across linguistic boundaries. Such sprachbund-type outcomes have, for example, been studied in the Balkans (Kopitar, 1829; Sobolev, 2004), Vanuatu (François, 2011), the Ethiopian highlands (Hayward, 1991), the West African littoral zone (Ameka, 2005), Amazonia (Epps, 2006), and India (Masica, 1976). On the other end, we find hierarchical and non-egalitarian ecologies with rather sharp ethn-olinguistic boundaries, such as those created by European colonialism and other enterprises of conquest (e.g., the Han expansion in China, and the expansion of Arabic in Western Asia and North Africa). Concentrations of economic and political power in the hands of few, population displacement, genocide, and enslavement may engender skewed demographic distributions and lead to rapid and large-scale language acquisition by adults. These scenarios typically involve far-reaching and fast-paced linguistic change, often in the course of language shift, ushering in the emergence of heavily restructured and new languages. The European-lexifier creoles of the southern hemisphere, the Romance languages of Europe, and the Arabic varieties of the Maghreb represent some of the possible outcomes of such scenarios. Other ecologies recombine characteristics of the social factors mentioned previously in various constellations, leading to a whole range of heterogeneous contact outcomes between these two idealized extremes, e.g., the emergence of urban youth languages in Africa and urban multi-ethnolects in Europe. In this chapter, I assess some of the social factors underpin-ning the processes and outcomes of language contact. I discuss explanations that have been Social factors