Professor Marianne Mithun @ LVC on Friday, February 13th!

Professor Marianne Mithun (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Language Variation and Change in Multilingual Contexts

Mithun

Most of the world is multilingual. There is now increasing awareness that language contact, the co-existence in one brain of multiple languages, can affect all aspects of those languages. Traditional language documentation has often been focused on ‘pure’ forms of the language. But if we are to understand how and why languages take the shapes they do, it is also important to document languages as they are spoken in multilingual contexts. Here varying effects of layers of contact are examined on a language indigenous to California, from prehistoric to modern times. Much can be learned from multilingual speakers exploiting their full inventory of linguistic resources.