Topic: Bilingualism and Language Contact.  This course will begin by
examining some of the basic findings on bilingualism: definitions,
typologies of bilingualism, issues of bilingualism and the human
brain, and issues of bilingual or multilingual speech communities.
Then we will turn our attention to the typology of contact
situations and to the linguistic consequences of language contact
(by which is meant the coexisting of more than one language in a
speech community for a prolonged period of time), including language
maintenance, language shift and language death; pidginization and
creolization; language intertwining or the creation of so-called
mixed languages such as Michif, Ma’a, and Media Lengua; lexical
borrowing, codeswitching, and grammatical borrowing including
calquing or replication. We will become familiar with the major
researchers in the field of language contact starting with Weinreich
and Haugen and including more recent work done by Thomason and
Kaufman, van Coetsem, Bakker and Mous, Myers-Scotton, Dorian,
Winford, and many others. Much of the material examined in this
course will be drawn from situations where French is one of the
languages in contact, whether in North America, Africa, Europe or
the South Pacific, and students enrolled in F675 will have
opportunities in course assignments and a term paper to explore
these varieties in greater detail. Joint-offered with LING L625.