Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: THEORY: Long-term bilingualism

From:ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...>
Date:Wednesday, September 26, 2007, 17:10
BP Jonsson wrote:
> >Does anyone have literature tips or ANADEWS on >long-term bilingualism, i.e. when one population >uses two or more languages for many generations. >
2 cases I can think of: --Spanish in the Philippines. I think the RCC did a good bit of education (aimed at conversion) that was not totally restrictred to the upper classes. Certainly the major languages (Tagalog, Bisayan) are full of Span. loans, in all areas of vocab. There was also the Span/native pidgin (creole?) Chavacano (Chacavano?). Upper class people tended to be very fluent in Spanish, to the extent that some only knew enough of the native languages to deal with servants and field hands. --Malay in Indonesia, pre-19th C. Mainly "market Malay", but reasonably correct Malay was sometimes spoken (I think) by chiefs and traders who had to deal with lots of outsiders. It no doubt helped that Ml. was generally cognate with the native langs. In the mid/late 19th C, missionaries began education in "standard" Ml. but that did not tend to displace the local languages. With introduction of public education after independence (1947), that plus nation-building fervor has led to more widespread abandonment of local languages, unfortunately.
> >Was it e.g. often the case that only the men >were bilingual, but not the children and women?
I seem to recall reading about such cases in Indonesia, but don't recall the details. There certainly are (were) cases where the women's language was phonologically distinct from the men's.