HKU Bulletin May 2012 (Vol. 13 No. 2)

Books He examines the socio-historical conditions that trigger the creation of a new language, as well as the factors that determine the grammatical outcome. “For example, Western colonial powers shipped Indonesian and Malay people to Sri Lanka as soldiers, servants and political exiles. There they interacted with the indigenous population and mixed elements of their respective languages to create a new variety of Malay,” he says. Language variation He first experienced the marvel of ‘variation’ in language as a second year student of Mandarin Chinese when he came to Hong Kong and encountered Cantonese and then to Penang where he heard Minnan (or Hokkien) spoken. He says in the book: “I had expected to find other Sinitic languages to be somewhat similar to the Mandarin I had learnt but I was instead struck by completely different grammatical systems; the Sinitic varieties were not mutually intelligible, which rendered the application of the label ‘dialects’ completely useless in their case.“ Which leads to the big question: When is a language a language and when is it just a dialect? Says Dr Ansaldo, “From a linguistic point of view we talk of varieties: a language has a standardised form and some kind of political recognition, while dialects don’t.” Chinese Coast Pidgin Some contact languages are incomplete and come about because the protagonists need to communicate only to a limited degree. In the 19 th century, a Chinese Coast Pidgin English was developed by traders along the south China coast and Canton region. “This language was created when the British were predominantly trading in the region, and some other countries were starting to get in on the action,” says Dr Ansaldo. “A form of English became the Lingua Franca and was used as the means of communication American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.” It’s an oddly clumsy phrase from a man of letters, but its sentiment aptly reflects the findings in Contact Languages: Ecology and Evolution in Asia that argues language is inherently creative and explores how new languages and hybrid languages evolve. between the British and the Chinese, between the Chinese and traders from other foreign countries, and between the British and traders from other foreign countries.” “But it was only ever used in a form related to trade. So what arose was a language confined to trading terms – numbers and currency, weights and measures and legalese. It was never a fully-fledged language, but it was used extensively.“ He has been collating research into contact languages in the Asian region since 2003. He used linguistic data, transcriptions of language samples and oral histories, as well as investigating the social processes that led to language creation. His findings include substantial evidence that Contact Language Formation is the natural – though not necessary – outcome of population admixture in shifting socio-historical contexts and that multilingualism and/or casual transmission support innovative use of language. “All languages change,” he says. “The young don’t want to talk like the old, the rich don’t want to talk like the poor. But what is Written by HKU Associate Professor in Linguistics Dr Umberto Ansaldo, the book examines contact languages – that is, languages which are created as a result of people of different ethnic backgrounds coming together when there is no particular political reason nor intervention from some higher authority to say which language should be dominant. interesting is when changes amount to an entirely new (or restructured) language, i.e. the process of language creation, as well as the phenomenon of language death.” M “Contact languages emerge through different ethnicities’ accommodation to each other,” says Dr Ansaldo. “The book looks into the social and grammatical dynamics that underline this process, concentrating particularly on new or restructured languages in Monsoon Asia, the Malaysian Indonesian region and Southern China.” Living Language How are new languages created when people from different ethnicities interact? A new study shows that a variety of social and structural dynamics underlie this fascinating phenomenon. Contact Malay varieties and their main locations in the Malay-Indonesian archipelago Malay communities in Sri Lanka 45 May 2012 The University of Hong Kong Bulletin