[Lingtyp] CfP The linguistic consequences of intermarriage in the Americas

[Gijn, E. van (Rik)]

Dear colleagues,

We invite submissions for the upcoming workshop on the linguistic consequences of intermarriage in the Americas (workshop description below), which will take place during the international Congress of Americanists in Novi Sad, Serbia, between 30 June and 4 July 2025. Papers should be submitted through the website of the conference (https://ica2025.uns.ac.rs/submit/openconf.php?al=so) by creating an author account and uploading an abstract by 31 December 2024. Each submission must contain the following information: name and surname(s) of the author, email address, institution to which he/she belongs, curriculum profile no longer than half a page, title of the presentation and abstract with a maximum of 250 words with 5 keywords. It is important that you mention in the comment field the title of the workshop and the names of the conveners, so that you can be associated to our workshop.
More information about the call and the conference can be found here: https://ica2025.uns.ac.rs/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ICA2025_Second-Call-FINAL-ENG.pdf or contact Rik van Gijn (e.van.gijn at hum.leidenuniv.nl<mailto:e.van.gijn at hum.leidenuniv.nl>)

Workshop description (see also https://ica2025.uns.ac.rs/areas-tematicas/ - scroll down to 18 Lingüística y Traducción)
The linguistic consequences of intermarriage in the Americas
Conveners: Rik van Gijn, Peter Bakker, Anja Hasse

Intermarriage, that is the marriage of two people originating from different ethnic, cultural, religious, or linguistic communities, is found in different parts of the world and of the Americas. This marriage practice has “adaptive value because it links people into a wider social network that can nurture, provide for, and protect during times of need” (Vaughn 2010: 163). Intermarriage can lead to linguistic convergence and linguistic areas (Aikhenvald 2002, Mithun 2017, Thomason 2023), to mixed languages (Bakker 2017), to genderlects (Bakker 2019) and ethnogenesis (Hornborg 2005, Hornborg & Eriksen 2011, Tiesler 2021), codeswitching and language shift. This symposium brings together specialists from different disciplines to discuss different settings and diverse linguistic consequences of exogamy and (voluntary and involuntary) intermarriages.
Intermarriage practices can be institutionalized (such as in the Vaupes region in the Amazonas, cf. e.g. Aikhenvald <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/josl.12052#josl12052-bib-0001> 2002; Jackson <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/josl.12052#josl12052-bib-0041> 1974, 1983; Sorensen <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/josl.12052#josl12052-bib-0083> 1967) or occasional (such as among the Swiss German- and the Pennsylvania Dutch-speaking Amish in the US, cf. e.g. Hasse & Seiler 2023). Yet, we must assume a critical number of mixed marriages in the community in order to see more permanent linguistic effects that can be found not only in these families, but also in a speech community. The marriages can be asymmetric (men A, women B) or symmetric (men A & B, women A & B).
The Americas present a particularly interesting picture, as it has been claimed for many areas in the Americas that mixed marriages (often institutionalized, but certainly common) has been part and parcel of the human population history in the continent for a long time, and continues to be highly relevant until the present day. For prehistoric Amazonia, for instance, it has been claimed that ethnic identity and ethnogenesis should be understood in the context of exchange systems based on regional specialization and alliances (Hornborg 2005, Londoño Sulkin 2017, Epps 2020). In many cases, particularly those involving Arawakan groups, this exchange system involved intermarriage or exogamy (Hornborg 2005). Intermarriage has also been presented as an explanatory factor in the genesis of the linguistic areas of Northern California and the Northwest coast (Thomason 2023, Mithun 2023).
The clearest and best studied case of this is the exchange system of the içana-Vaupés area situated in the Colombian-Brazilian border area. This  area is well known for its institutionalized linguistic exogamy between Arawakan and East-Tukanoan groups, specifically between speakers of Tariana and Tukano, and the linguistic consequences of this system is the subject of several studies (Aikhenvald 2002, Fleming 2016, Chernela 2018). This relationship is characterized first by a system of linguistic exogamy, combined with strict policies with respect to language choice and language use in the context of widespread and long-term multilingualism (Sorensen 1967; Epps and Stenzel 2013; Cayón and Chacon 2023). The systematic consequence of this situation in the language structure is convergence at the abstract grammatical level without much lexical borrowing (Aikhenvald 2002), a pattern argued to be common throughout Amazonia (Bowern et al. 2011, Epps 2020), and taboos against lexical codeswitching.
Similar patterns are found in parts of North America, where “many neighboring languages show surprisingly few shared words, but extensive structural parallelisms” (Mithun 2020: 503). Although the intensity and nature of contact between different groups can vary widely from one area to another, Mithun (2017) argues  that, especially in areas of highly diverse, small-scale, dense populations “exogamy and multilingualism were often the norm”. This is particularly true for northern California, which, like the north-west Amazon, is home to many different language families, showing a very fragmented linguistic ecology, coupled with relatively balanced power relations and ubiquitous multilingualism.
The linguistic effects of intermarriage in colonial settings have been described for various speech communities in the Americas. In these communities, intermarriages have increased linguistic diversity by leading to  the emergence of new languages. In Canada, intermarriages between indigenous women speaking Cree and French-speaking male fur traders ultimately lead to the development of a new so-called mixed language, Michif, combining features of Cree and of French (cf. e.g. Bakker 2017). It has been argued that male speakers of Carib and female speakers of Arawak were responsible for the emergence of the mixed language Island Carib, and its subsequent genderlect in Garifuna. The Americas, especially the Circum-Caribbean region, is home to dozens of new languages, with diverse ancestral lineages. Here too, intermarriages (Newman 2018) accelerated the genesis  of so-called creole languages (cf. e.g. Faraclas 2012, Kihm 2011), characterized by predominantly colonial roots and innovated grammatical systems. Some creole languages show significant lexical admixture, sometimes associated with population admixture.
There are also intermarriages between various groups who are not native to the Americas. In these communities, intermarriages can either support or restrain linguistic diversity. In the Swiss Amish communities, linguistic (but not religious) exogamy has been described as being one of the main factors contributing to the development of a new mixed language, Amish Shwitzer (e.g. Hasse & Seiler 2023), combining two Germanic varieties. Thus, exogamous patterns are attested across different periods and different areas of the Americas. This workshop is a very first attempt to discuss linguistic consequences of these marriage practices, with input from other disciplines such as anthropology, history and genetics.

References
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Bakker, Peter. 2019. “Intentional language change and the connection between mixed languages and genderlects.” Language Dynamics and Change 9: 135–161.
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