A mixed language is a language that arises when speakers of different languages are in contact and show a high degree of bilingualism. Occasionally, more than two languages may be involved.
Definitions
A mixed language differs from a pidgin in that its speakers developing the language are fluent, even native, speakers of the source languages concerned, whereas a pidgin develops when groups of people with no knowledge of each other's languages come into contact and have need of a basic communication system, e.g. for trade, but do not have enough contact to learn each other's language or to develop a lingua franca.
A mixed language differs from a creole in that both parents are clearly identifiable. This is not the case with creoles, who have a more diverse input, which can very often not be traced to any language. Also, while creoles tend to have drastically reduced inflections, mixed languages sometimes retain the inflectional complexities of both parent languages.
It differs from code-switching in that it is set in its grammar and vocabulary, rather than the choice being left to the mood of the speaker. Speakers of mixed languages often do not know the input languages, something that precludes the possibility of linguistic improvisation.
Code-switching
A mixed language may be said to evolve from persistent code-switching, and indeed language names such as "Spanglish" or "Porglish" are often given to persistent code-switching long before it is clear that a genuine mixed language has evolved. Other apparent mixed languages, such as Franglais and Yinglish, also are really nothing more than varieties of a language (such as French and English, respectively) characterized by large numbers of loanwords from another language (such as English and Yiddish, respectively).
Mixed languages
A genuine mixed language usually appears as the marker of a new ethnic or cultural group (e.g., Métis or immigrants).
Good examples of genuine mixed languages include:
- Michif, a mixture of French and Cree, where the nouns and adjectives tend to be French (including agreement), and the polysynthetic verbs are entirely Cree. There are two simultaneous gender systems, French masculine/feminine as well as Cree animate/inanimate, and the Cree obviative (fourth person).
- Mednyj Aleut, a mixture of Russian and Aleut, which retains Aleut verbs but has replaced most of the inflectional endings with their Russian equivalents.
- Cappadocian Greek, comprising mostly Greek root words, but with many Turkish grammatical endings and Turkish vowel harmony, and no gender.
- Mbugu or Ma’a: an inherited Cushitic vocabulary with a borrowed Bantu inflectional system.
- AngloRomani (mixture of Roma vocabulary and English syntax)
- Media Lengua (mixture of Quechua morphology and Spanish lexicon)
Possible examples include:
See also
References
- Bakker, Peter (1997). A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Metis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509712-2.
- Bakker, P., and M. Mous, eds. (1994). Mixed languages: 15 case studies in language intertwining. Amsterdam: IFOTT.
- Matras, Yaron and Peter Bakker, eds. (2003). The Mixed Language Debate: Theoretical and Empirical Advances. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-017776-5.
- Mous, Maarten. 2003. The making of a mixed language: The case of Ma'a/Mbugu. Creole language library (No. 26). Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Pub. Co.
- Sebba, Mark (1997). Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles. MacMillan. ISBN 0-333-63024-6.
- Thomason, Sarah and Terrence Kaufman (1988). Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07893-4.
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