Language Contact and the History of English

Gabriella Mazzon

On a general level, typological studies have increasingly looked at the effects of language contact in terms of phonology, morphology and syntax, an approach that predominates when it comes to the investigation of areal phenomena. Since the borrowing of ‘content words’ has been considered the ‘easiest’ and therefore the most common, but also the least interesting product of language contact in Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988) model, it has been partly neglected. The study of code-switching in a wider perspective, including diachronic and historical approaches (Pahta 2010, Schendl and Wright 2012) has brought to a more systematic consideration of the consequences of borrowing on the lexicon seen as a system. These consequences can be studied in relation to language change in general, although most studies carried out in this perspective have also focussed on grammar (Hickey 2012).

Some general orientation, however, emerge, not only in the consideration of the role of code-switching in vocabulary expansion but also when looking at the coexistence between lexical items of different origin within a semantic sphere. For instance, Sylvester (2018: 249 ff.) poses the question of whether it is the introduction of new words that pushes old words to move to a different meaning or vice versa, i.e. whether a meaning shift in a pre-existing word makes the semantic space ‘free’ for the introduction of a loanword – in other words, is vocabulary enrichment via borrowing created by pull-chains or push-chains? The question is especially relevant for the more technical registers, but can be extended to sets of lexical items belonging to the ‘core lexicon’ as well. Molencki (2018) mentions the fact that the concept of layering, often used within discourse on grammaticalization, can also be applied to the lexicon, given the fact that many OE words appear for some time side by side with Scandinavian or Latin words, before being replaced. The coexistence of more than one items in the same semantic area can give rise to specialization or to the obsolescence of one of them, but this could be preceded by a phase of layering in which old meanings and new meanings, old words and new words, coexist in free variation in the lexicon.

Among the most recent approaches, Wasserscheidt’s (2021) gives space to the speaker’s mind as the real locus of language contact and invokes a more flexible notion of a language as a system by stressing four relevant points: ‘the primacy of individual language knowledge, the need for scalable system concepts, the need for a non-explicit definition of language systems and an approach that explains language knowledge bottom-up’ (Wasserscheidt 2021: 280). This approach was developed on synchronic modern data, for which interactions between bilingual speakers are readily available, but it can be applied to mixed texts of the past, for instance, if we follow some form of uniformitarian assumption about the language competence of text-producers, which formed a much more homogeneous social groups than today. Immanent elements like social evaluation and salience in the perception of a feature are also important, since a process like short-term accommodation based on those elements can be conducive to borrowing forms that can later become part of the lexicon (Britain 2010: 209–11).

Although the study of extensive contact has often involved the most diverse language families, English has raised interest also because of the heterogeneous etymologies of its lexicon and because of its history, given the early dominations and the subsequent expansion. In fact, contact with other languages has had an impact on English from times that are even antecedent to its documented history (Trudgill 2016), but the cases of contact that have attractd the most attention from early on (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 263 ff.) are those that emerge in Old and Middle English. Reflections on different loanword absorption, including loanword translation, start with evidence from Old English glosses, which, although of course provided by a very restricted class of people, testify to the early application of vocabulary innovation that will then be extended to further areas of the lexicon (Kornexl 2001). At the other end of the chronological line, the emergence of contact phenomena in the lexical development of the then called ‘New Englishes’ has sparked new strands of discussion about the impact of societal multilingualism, of factors of prestige and other elements of cultural stratification, and of acquisitional processes in general, on lexical and structural transfer (Mazzon 2001).

As concerns the impact of French, its contribution to the core vocabulary, as well as to the technical vocabulary, of English is quite visible and has been extensively researched, although studies are still producing new insight. Burnley (2001: 27–8) was one of the first to alert to the ambiguity residing in the use of the label ‘French’ tout court for historical borrowing into English, a view that has since been refined by successive waves of studies into the different contributions of Anglo-Norman, for instance. An approach that differentiates in a more refined way both sources and destinations of loanwords is also increasingly spreading. For instance, Durkin (2014: 40) notices that the Middle English period contributed the most borrowings to the high-frequency lexicon of Present-Day English. Quite often, it is not clear from the form taken by the word if it comes directly from Latin or via French, although usually the spelling is a good indicator. Nevertheless, Durkin (2014: 31–3) notices that a rough approximation can be reached about the predominance of one source or the other at different epochs. This includes the problematization of the concept of core vocabulary itself, as discussed recently by Durkin (2018) in relation to both French and Scandinavian words in ME within the lexical field of transport.

2 The papers in this volume

The first three chapters of this volume look at language contact at the macro-level, with the chapter by Schendl on borrowing and code-switching, Andersen’s discussion of aspects of language contact from a socio-pragmatic perspective, and Durkin’s elaboration on the development of Anglo-Norman as a product of contact.

Philip Durkin, one of the main authorities on the topic of historical borrowing in English, looks again at the impact of Anglo-Norman on the English lexicon beyond the well-known measurement of the huge numbers. Taking a socio-cultural perspective into consideration, which is very profitable if we consider the contribution of technical registers to the inflow of loanwords, Durkin notes that Anglo-Norman may have been an intermediary for the intake of words from other languages. The chapter offers the opportunity for an assessment of the respective contributions of Anglo-Norman and continental French or Latin, as well as for some meta-reflections about the current historical dictionaries of English, and the ways in which they treat medieval etymologies.

The linguistic reflexes of contact between English and Scandinavian have been investigated thoroughly for the first stages of English textual history, times in which the coexistence of the two cultures was close and persistent in large parts of Britain – recent considerations on this contact are in Durkin (2014: 173 ff.). The paper by Gisle Andersen recaps some of the main results of this strand of research and then moves on to investigate some more recent influences of Scandinavian on the English lexicon, given the fact that the contact between the two cultures is not as strong and deep as in previous times. As Andersen emphasizes, migration from Scandinavia into Britain and the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although often considered only in relation to the converse influence, i.e. that of English on Scandinavian languages, has led to the further addition of several words of Scandinavian origin to the English lexicon. Some of these are technical terms, or ‘gap-fillers’, but others can be classified as ‘luxury loans’ and prove that there is still a cultural influence from North Germanic cultures on the English-speaking world. The currency of words like slalom, hygge and moped in some relevant corpora, even when differences in frequency and type of loanword are considered, testifies to this.

Letizia Vezzosi connects romance borrowings in the Late Middle English poem Saint Erkenwald to strategic authorial choices having to do with the writer’s cultural milieu but also with audience design. In particular, the types of Romance borrowings found in the poem are reviewed in detail, including formulae, binomials and collocations, in terms of the stylistic registers they represent. Vezzosi shows that the poet included a number of ‘technical’ loanwords in different subfields of religion, even if this inclusion entailed metrical difficulties, and sets this choice in close relation to theological and ecclesiological issues that were current at the time of composition of the poem.

Julia Landmann reassesses the impact of nineteenth-century borrowings from German on contemporary English, an impact that has been under-researched so far. Both in Britain and, especially, in North America, German was widespread as a minority language, because of immigration that was, particularly in the US, quite widespread, and brought to the establishment of large settlements that were very prosperous. The tragic facts of the first part of the twentieth century, especially WWI and II, created a shift in language attitudes, which is visible in the nature of loanwords that English has taken from German in the two epochs, as shown by Landmann’s chapter, which concentrates on the first part of the century.