language shift

[Michael Dunn]

It does not neccessarily follow that there is no correlation between the
economic/political factors driving language shift and morphological
complexity. There is a tendancy (explored in e.g. Nettle 1999 Linguistic
Diversity) for small, isolated languages with speech communities sharing
large amounts of background knowledge to be structurally more opaque
(greater degrees of suppletion etc) than large languages spoken by
heterogenous speech communities whose members do not have much shared
context.

The target language in language shift is usually a contact language,
which, by definition, is a language of intercultural communication, and so
the type (2) -- shift from 'simpler' to 'more complex' is always going to
be the norm.

A counterexample I can think of is the shift from creoles to standard
English, Spanish etc in many parts of the world. In these cases, one
contact language is being assimilated by another with higher prestige, so
the typical situation of small homogenous community speaking the source
language does not obtain. Other counterexamples might occur when the
target language of language shift is also the language of a (hitherto)
heterogenous speech community. In this case the relative complexity of
source and target is probably random. The Hungarian example might be an
example of this.

Michael Dunn
___________________________________________
Michael Dunn
Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguistiek
PB 310, NL-6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands
 +31 (0)24 3521282 (wk) +31 (0)24 3521300 (fax)
 http://www.mpi.nl/world/persons/profession/micdunn.html

ESF/NWO Project "Pioneers of Island Melanesia"
 http://www.eastpapuan.ling.su.se/