 | This article includes a list ofgeneral references, butit lacks sufficient correspondinginline citations. Please help toimprove this article byintroducing more precise citations.(August 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Inlinguistics, astratum (Latin for 'layer') orstrate is a historical layer oflanguage that influences or is influenced by another language throughcontact. The notion of "strata" was first developed by the Italian linguistGraziadio Isaia Ascoli, and became known in the English-speaking world through the work of two different authors in 1932.[1]
Both concepts apply to a situation where an intrusive language establishes itself in the territory of another, typically as the result ofmigration. Whether the superstratum case (the local language persists and the intrusive language disappears) or the substratum one (the local language disappears and the intrusive language persists) applies will normally only be evident after several generations, during which the intrusive language exists within adiaspora culture.
In order for the intrusive language to persist, thesubstratum case, the immigrant population will either need to take the position of a politicalelite or immigrate in significant numbers relative to the local population, i.e., the intrusion qualifies as aninvasion orcolonisation. An example would be theRoman Empire giving rise toRomance languages outside Italy, displacingGaulish and many otherIndo-European languages.
Thesuperstratum case refers to elite invading populations that eventually adopt the language of the native lower classes. An example would be theBurgundians andFranks in France, who eventually abandoned their Germanic dialects in favor of other Indo-European languages of the Romance branch, profoundly influencing the local speech in the process.
A substratum (plural: substrata) or substrate is a language that an intrusive language influences, which may or may not ultimately change it to become a new language. The term is also used of substrate interference, i.e. the influence the substratum language exerts on the replacing language. According to some classifications, this is one of three main types oflinguistic interference: substratum interference differs from bothadstratum, which involves no language replacement but rather mutual borrowing between languages of equal "value", andsuperstratum, which refers to the influence a socially dominating language has on another, receding language that might eventually be relegated to the status of a substratum language.
In a typical case of substrate interference, a Language A occupies a given territory and another Language B arrives in the same territory, brought, for example, with migrations of population. Language B then begins to supplant language A: the speakers of Language A abandon their own language in favor of the other language, generally because they believe that it will help them achieve certain goals within government, the workplace, and in social settings. During the language shift, the receding language A still influences language B, for example, through the transfer ofloanwords,place names, or grammatical patterns from A to B.
In most cases, the ability to identify substrate influence in a language requires knowledge of the structure of the substrate language. This can be acquired in numerous ways:[2]
One of the first-identified cases of substrate influence is an example of a substrate language of the second type:Gaulish, from the ancient Celtic people the Gauls. TheGauls lived in the modern French-speaking territory before the arrival of theRomans, namely the invasion of Julius Caesar's army. Given the cultural, economic and political advantages that came with being a Latin speaker, the Gauls eventually abandoned their language in favor of the language brought to them by the Romans, which evolved in this region, until eventually it took the form of the French language that is known today. The Gaulish speech disappeared in the late Roman era, but remnants of its vocabulary survive in some French words, approximately 200, as well as place-names of Gaulish origin.[3]
It is posited that some structural changes in French were shaped at least in part by Gaulish influence[3] including diachronic sound changes andsandhi phenomena due to the retention of Gaulish phonetic patterns after the adoption of Latin,[4][5][6]calques such asaveugle ("blind", literally without eyes, from Latinab oculis, which was a calque on the Gaulish wordexsops with the same semantic construction as modern French)[7] with other Celtic calques possibly including "oui", the word for yes,[8] while syntactic and morphological effects are also posited.[8][9][10]
Other examples of substrate languages are the influence of the now extinctNorth GermanicNorn language on theScots dialects of theShetland andOrkney islands. In the ArabMiddle East andNorth Africa, colloquialArabic dialects, most especiallyLevantine,Egyptian, andMaghreb dialects, often exhibit significant substrata from other regional Semitic (especiallyAramaic), and Berber languages.Yemeni Arabic hasModern South Arabian,Old South Arabian andHimyaritic substrata.
Typically,Creole languages have multiple substrata, with the actual influence of such languages being indeterminate.
In the absence of all three lines of evidence mentioned above, linguistic substrata may be difficult to detect. Substantial indirect evidence is needed to infer the former existence of a substrate. The nonexistence of a substrate isdifficult to show,[11] and to avoid digressing into speculation,burden of proof must lie on the side of the scholar claiming the influence of a substrate. The principle ofuniformitarianism[12] and results from the study ofhuman genetics suggest that many languages have formerly existed that have since then been replaced under expansive language families, such as Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic or Bantu. However, it is not a given that such expansive languages would have acquired substratum influence from the languages they have replaced.
Several examples of this type of substratum have still been claimed. For example, the earliest form of theGermanic languages may havebeen influenced by a non-Indo-European language, purportedly the source of about one quarter of the most ancient Germanic vocabulary. There are similar arguments for aSanskrit substrate, aGreek one, and a substrate underlying theSami languages. Relatively clear examples are theFinno-Ugric languages of theChude and the "Volga Finns" (Merya,Muromian, andMeshcheran): while unattested, their existence has been noted in medieval chronicles, and one or more of them have left substantial influence in theNorthern Russian dialects.
By contrast, more contentious cases are theVasconic substratum theory andOld European hydronymy, which hypothesize large families of substrate languages across western Europe. Some smaller-scale unattested substrates that remain under debate involve alleged extinct branches of the Indo-European family, such as "Nordwestblock" substrate in the Germanic languages, and a "Temematic" substrate inBalto-Slavic, proposed byGeorg Holzer.[11] The nameTemematic is an abbreviation of "tenuis, media, media aspirata, tenuis", referencing a sound shift presumed common to the group.
When a substrate language or its close relatives cannot be directly studied, their investigation is rooted in the study ofetymology andlinguistic typology. The study of unattested substrata often begins from the study ofsubstrate words, which lack a clear etymology.[13] Such words can in principle still be native inheritance, lost everywhere else in the language family, but they might in principle also originate from a substrate.[14] The sound structure of words of unknown origin — theirphonology andmorphology — can often suggest hints in either direction.[11][15]
So can their meaning: words referring to the natural landscape, in particular indigenous fauna and flora, have often been found especially likely to derive from substrate languages.[11][13][14] None of these conditions is sufficient by itself to claim any one word as originating from an unknown substratum.[11] Occasionally words that have been proposed to be of substrate origin will be found out to have cognates in more distantly related languages after all, and therefore likely native: an example is Proto-Indo-European*mori 'sea', found widely in the northern and western Indo-European languages, but in more eastern Indo-European languages only inOssetic.[14]
Although the influence of the prior language when a community speaks, and adopts, a new one may have been informally acknowledged beforehand, the concept was formalized and popularized initially in the late 19th century. As historical phonology emerged as a discipline, the initial dominant viewpoint was that influences fromlanguage contact on phonology and grammar should be assumed to be marginal, and an internal explanation should always be favored if possible. As articulated by Max Mueller in 1870,Es gibt keine Mischsprache ("there are nomixed languages").[16] In the 1880s, dissent began to crystallize against this viewpoint. Within Romance language linguistics, the 1881Lettere glottologiche ofGraziadio Isaia Ascoli argued that the early phonological development ofFrench and otherGallo-Romance languages was shaped by the retention by Celts of their "oral dispositions" even after they had switched to Latin.[17]
In 1884,Hugo Schuchardt's related but distinct concept ofcreole languages was used to counter Mueller's view. In modern historical linguistics, debate persists on the details of how language contact may induce structural changes. The respective extremes of "all change is contact" and "there are no structural changes ever" have largely been abandoned in favor of a set of conventions on how to demonstrate contact induced structural changes. These include adequate knowledge of the two languages in question, a historical explanation, and evidence that the contact-induced phenomenon did not exist in the recipient language before contact, among other guidelines.
A superstratum (plural: superstrata) or superstrate offers the counterpart to a substratum. When a different language influences a base language to result in a new language, linguists label the influencing language a superstratum and the influenced language a substratum.
A superstrate may also represent an imposed linguistic element akin to what occurred withEnglish andNorman after the Norman Conquest of 1066 when use of the English language carried low prestige. Theinternational scientific vocabulary coinages from Greek and Latin roots adopted by European languages (and subsequently by other languages) to describe scientific topics (sociology, zoology, philosophy, botany, medicine, all "-logy" words, etc.) can also be termed a superstratum,[citation needed] although for this last case, "adstratum" might be a better designation (despite the prestige of science and of its language). In the case ofFrench, for example,Latin is the superstrate andGaulish the substrate.
Some linguists contend thatJapanese (andJaponic languages in general) consists of anAltaic superstratum projected onto anAustronesian substratum.[18] Some scholars also argue for the existence of Altaic superstrate influences onvarieties of Chinese spoken inNorthern China.[19] In this case, however, the superstratum refers to influence, not language succession. Other views detectsubstrate effects.[20]
 | This sectiondoes notcite anysources. Please helpimprove this section byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged andremoved.(July 2019) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
An adstratum (plural: adstrata) or adstrate is a language that influences another language by virtue of geographic proximity, not by virtue of its relative prestige. For example, early inEngland's history,Old Norse served as an adstrate, contributing to the lexical structure ofOld English.[21]
The phenomenon is less common today in standardized linguistic varieties and more common in colloquial forms of speech. Modern nations tend to favour a single linguistic variety, often corresponding to thedialect of thecapital and other important regions, over others.
InIndia, where dozens of languages are widespread, many languages could be said to share an adstratal relationship, butHindi is certainly a dominant adstrate inNorth India.
A different example would be the sociolinguistic situation inBelgium, where theFrench andDutch languages have roughly the same status. They could justifiably be called adstrates to each other as each has provided a large set of lexical specifications to the other.
The term adstratum is also used to identify systematic influences or a layer of borrowings in a given language from another language, independently of whether the two languages continue coexisting as separate entities. Many modern languages have an appreciable adstratum from English, due both to the cultural influence and economic preponderance of the United States on international markets, and the earlier colonization by theBritish Empire that made English a globallingua franca. The Greek and Latin coinages adopted by European languages, including English and now languages worldwide, to describe scientific topics, sociology, medicine, anatomy, biology, all the '-logy' words, etc., are also justifiably called adstrata.
Another example is found inSpanish andPortuguese, which contain a heavy Semitic, particularly Arabic, adstratum.Yiddish is a linguistic variety ofHigh German with adstrata fromHebrew andAramaic, mostly in the sphere of religion.Slavic languages were linked geographically to Yiddish-speaking villages in Eastern Europe for centuries up until theHolocaust.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)