What Language Features can be ‘Borrowed’?

Abstract

Abstract One of the issues which always arises in discussions of language contact is the question of which features can be transferred (or ‘borrowed’) from one language to another. The one definite conclusion which almost every examination of language contact has inevitably come to is that expressed by Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 14): ‘as far as the strictly linguistic possibilities go, any linguistic feature can be transferred from any language to any other language’. Indeed, it is obvious without the need for examination of any data that, if no constraints are placed on the languages in question, any linguistic change which can occur must be transferable from one language to another. A community which speaks ‘a language’ does not wake up one morning having changed a feature of that language. Instead, the change spreads from an original point of innovation throughout the language community — that is, a linguistic feature is transferred from one language, that of speaker A, to ‘another’ language, that of speaker B (cf. Milroy 1997, especially 315 − 17). While the’languages’ of different speakers within a single language community are clearly very closely related, there is no obvious boundary beyond which ‘borrowing’ should not be considered to take place: is it borrowing if it occurs between two dialects of a language, is it borrowing if it occurs between two closely related languages, is it borrowing if it occurs between two unrelated languages, and so on.

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