Contact through trade and migration

The movement of people through migration and trade has always brought speakers of different languages into contact.

These encounters can be brief and their effects limited to changes in vocabulary, or long term and highly transformative. Grammatical systems can be reshaped, pronunciation can be altered and, ultimately, new languages can be born. In this section, we’ll see how trade and migration have shaped several languages around the world.

Sociolinguist Paul Kerswill wrote:

“in every case of migration, except where a homogeneous group of people moves to an isolated location, language or dialect contact ensues” (Kerswill, 2006, p.1).

“It is the sociolinguistic history of the speakers, and not the structure of their language, that is the primary determinant of the linguistic outcome of language contact” (p. 35).

In other words, whether a language borrows new words, changes its grammar or disappears altogether depends largely on social relationships.

Swahili

One of the clearest examples of trade-based language contact is Swahili, known locally as Kiswahili, which is spoken along the East African coast. Although Swahili is a Bantu language at its core, its long history as a trade language has left a significant mark on its vocabulary. Words of Arabic origin are especially prominent, making up 40% of Swahili words. Even the word Swahili itself comes from the Arabic sawāḥilī meaning “of the coast”. Swahili has also absorbed words from Portuguese, Persian, and Hindi, reflecting centuries of maritime contact across the Indian Ocean (Wald & Gibson, 2018). It also serves as a regional lingua franca, allowing diverse African groups to communicate with each other.

Bazaar Malay

Bazaar Malay, or mĕlayu pasar, emerged as a simplified form of Malay used along trade routes in Southeast Asia. Spoken in port cities from the Malay Peninsula to China, Bazaar Malay drew its core vocabulary from Malay. This makes Malay the lexifier language. However, the language was heavily shaped by Hokkien, a Chinese dialect spoken by economically and socially dominant merchant communities. As a result of Hokkien influence, grammatical features in Malay changed: plural markers disappeared; Malay’s variable word order became much more rigid and there were fewer ways to express different tenses (Aye, 2013). Bazaar Malay fell out of use after the British East India Company took control of Singapore in the early 19th century, but it remains a pertinent example of language influence through trade. We will explore similar examples in week 2 (step 2.14) when we discuss the changing status of creoles.

Afrikaans

Migration can also lead to intense language contact, especially when communities are displaced or resettled in new regions. One example is Afrikaans, a language that developed in South Africa during and after the Dutch colonial period. While much of its vocabulary comes from the Dutch spoken by European settlers, Afrikaans also bears the marks of contact with the enslaved populations of the Cape Colony. As a result, Afrikaans contains many Malay words introduced by Malaysian slaves and terms borrowed from local Bantu languages such as Xhosa and Zulu. This helped shape Afrikaans into a distinct language with its own grammar. It lost gender and case distinctions found in Dutch and verbs no longer mark for person or number (Kriel, 2018). For many years, it was dismissed as “Kitchen Dutch”, a reference to its origins among enslaved people in colonial households, but in 1925, it was recognised as one of South Africa’s official languages.

Just as trade relationships and migrations routes vary, so too does the influence that languages have on each other. Social relationships are extremely important factors in shaping how languages influence each other. Prestige, power and time can all determine whether a language simply borrows a large number of words or evolves into an entirely new language.

References

Aye, K. K. (2013). Singapore Bazaar Malay. In S. M. Michaelis, P. Maurer, M. Haspelmath, & M. Huber (Eds.), The survey of pidgin and creole languages: Vol 3. Contact languages based on languages from Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. Oxford University Press. https://apics-online.info/surveys/67

Kerswill, P. (2006). Migration and language. Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik. An international handbook of the science of language and society, 3, 1-27.

Kriel, M. (2018). Chronicle of a Creole: the ironic history of Afrikaans. In Creolization and pidginization in contexts of postcolonial diversity (pp. 132-157). Brill.

Thomason, S. G., & Kaufman, T. (1991). Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. University of California Press.

Wald, B., & Gibson, H. (2018). Swahili and the Bantu languages. In The world’s major languages (pp. 903-924). Routledge.