New Perspectives on Mixed Languages

From Core to Fringe

Maria Mazzoli, Eeva Sippola, Maria Mazzoli, Eeva Sippola

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501511141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A growing number of language varieties with diverse backgrounds and structural typologies have been identified as mixed. However, the debate on the status of many varieties and even on the existence of the category of "mixed languages" continues still today.
This volume examines the current state of the theoretical and empirical debate on mixed languages and presents new advances from a diverse set of mixed language varieties. These cover well-known mixed languages, such as Media Lengua, Michif, Gurindji Kriol, and Kallawaya, and varieties whose classification is still debated, such as Reo Rapa, Kumzari, Jopará, and Wutun. The contributions deal with different aspects of mixed languages, including descriptive approaches to their current status and origins, theoretical discussions on the language contact processes in them, and analysis of different types of language mixing practices.
This book contributes to the current debate on the existence of the mixed language category, shedding more light onto this fascinating group of languages and the contact processes that shape them.

Wutun as a mixed language

Erika Sandman

University of Helsinki

1 Introduction

1.1 The Wutun language and the Amdo Sprachbund

The Wutun language is spoken by ca. 4000 people in Wutun, a rural locality consisting of the three villages of Upper Wutun, Lower Wutun and Jiacangma located in Tongren County, Huangnan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, P.R. China. In spite of the small number of speakers, it remains a vigorous language actively used by all generations of its speech community. Wutun represents a high degree of both lexical and grammatical mixing. While most of its basic vocabulary and grammatical forms are of Sinitic (more precisely, Northwest Mandarin) origin, its morphology and syntax show heavy influence from neighboring Tibetic and Mongolic languages. Both non-Sinitic and Sinitic source languages contribute significant amounts of grammar (Sandman 2016). Unlike most of the Sinitic varieties that are predominantly isolating languages, Wutun has an agglutinative morphology with an elaborate system of number and case marking, aspect marking, egophoric marking and converbal constructions used for clause combining. The most prominent contact language of Wutun is Amdo Tibetan, a local lingua franca and the second language for almost all the Wutun speakers. Wutun has also interacted with Bonan, a Mongolic language spoken by ca. 4000 people in four villages located near three Wutun-speaking villages.¹ The contact situation of Wutun is further complicated by the fact that Wutun and its contact languages are part of a larger linguistic area, the Amdo Sprachbund. Many contact features of Wutun are also observed in other Sinitic languages of the region, such as Huangshui (previously known as Xining Chinese, Dede 2007), Xunhua (Dwyer 1995), Linxia (Dwyer 1992; Lee-Smith 1996a), Gangou (Zhu et al. 1997) and Tangwang (Ibrahim 1985; Lee-Smith 1996b; Xu 2017), and it is not always obvious whether the source language for these features is Tibetic or Mongolic, since Tibetic and Mongolic languages share a number of morpho-syntactic features (such as basic word order, agglutinative morphology, differential object marking and lack of numeral classifiers).

The Amdo Sprachbund² (also known in the literature as the Qinghai-Gansu Sprachbund) comprises some 15–19 languages spoken in the Upper Yellow River Basin of Western China, in Eastern Qinghai and Southern Gansu Provinces (Janhunen 2007, 2012, 2015). Historically the area has been part of Tibet and it has been known by the name Amdo. Genealogically, the languages of the Amdo Sprachbund represent four language families: Sinitic, Tibetic, Mongolic and Turkic. In the course of its history, the Amdo region has been dominated by all these linguistic groups, which have left linguistic traces. The Tibetans represent the oldest population in the area, their arrival connected to the expansion of the Tibetan empire between the 7th and 9th centuries. The Mongol empire and its representative in China, the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) contributed to the migration of both Mongolic-speaking populations as well as for Turkic and Sinitic speakers to the area. Since the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the Amdo Sprachbund has been politically dominated by the Chinese, although the number of Sinitic speakers in many parts of the area has remained lo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Mixed languages: From core to fringe
• Noun-Verb mixed languages: Similarities and differences
• Advances in mixed language phonology: An overview of three case studies
• How sentence processing sheds light on mixed language creation
• Michif mixed verbs: Typologically unusual word-internal mixing
• VO vs. OV: What conditions word order variation in Media Lengua?
• Linguistic manipulations in Kallawaya
• Social identity and the formation and development of Barranquenho
• Ilokano-Spanish: Borrowing, code-switching or a mixed language?
• Jopara as a case of a variable mixed language
• Pronominal usage in Cité Duits, a Dutch-German-Limburgish contact variety
• Wutun as a mixed language
• Repertoire management and the performative origin of Mixed Languages
• Subject Index
• Language Index