Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
- Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Maps Volume I
- Figures Volume I
- Tables Volume I
- Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part One Language Contact and Genetic Linguistics
- Part Two Linguistic Areas
- Part Three Language Spread
- Part Four Emergence and Spread of Some European Languages
- Part Five Language Diasporas
- 19 Diasporas: An Overview
- 20 Labor Migrations: Language Change in Communities and Diasporas
- 21 The Korean Diaspora
- 22 The Chinese Diaspora: Language Maintenance and Loss
- 23 The Diachrony of Yiddish and Judaeo-Spanish as Contact Languages
- Author Index
- Language Index
- Subject Index
- References
19 - Diasporas: An Overview
from Part Five - Language Diasporas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 June 2022
- The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
- Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Maps Volume I
- Figures Volume I
- Tables Volume I
- Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part One Language Contact and Genetic Linguistics
- Part Two Linguistic Areas
- Part Three Language Spread
- Part Four Emergence and Spread of Some European Languages
- Part Five Language Diasporas
- 19 Diasporas: An Overview
- 20 Labor Migrations: Language Change in Communities and Diasporas
- 21 The Korean Diaspora
- 22 The Chinese Diaspora: Language Maintenance and Loss
- 23 The Diachrony of Yiddish and Judaeo-Spanish as Contact Languages
- Author Index
- Language Index
- Subject Index
- References
Summary
Diaspora formation, like that of ethnic enclaves, is a process to be analyzed according to gender, generation, and social status given different spheres of communication and thus different linguistic registers. Children of migrants, in particular when attending school in the receiving society, form again different registers and, more than their parents, communicate with peers of the new majority language or of several languages. Linguistic métissage (“hybridization”) is a generational phenomenon. A functional analysis of “ethnic” elites indicates that clerics, journalists, and writers, in contrast to managers and mediators with the outside world, advocated language retention, since liturgies, literary writings, and culture-of-origin news may not easily be transposed into another language. Common people, on the other hand, in order to cope with challenges of their daily diasporic lives, needed quick rudimentary competence in the receiving country’s language. Language hybridization, in contrast to an established koine, involves a language of parental origin and a language of peer group and school socialization out of the context of parental cultural background and out of intense integration into the receiving society. Thus, diasporic language formation occurs in a process of merging and recontextualizing.
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- The Cambridge Handbook of Language ContactVolume 1: Population Movement and Language Change, pp. 613 - 640Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022