Due to illness the lecture will take place at a later date
Languages in contact and contact languages: it’s all about languages and contact!
Language contact is, in its simplest definition, the use of more than one language in the same place at the same time. In this talk I will showcase different scenarios of language contact, including pidgins, creoles, bilingual mixed languages, and indigenized varieties of the major European languages. The best known indigenized varieties are the so-called ‘New Englishes’ of e.g. Nigeria, India or Singapore, where English has been restructured under the influence of pronunciation patterns and grammar of the local languages. I hope to show that there is in principal no limit to what speakers of different languages will borrow or transfer from each other, given the right opportunity.
