ABSTRACT

Andre Martinet's paper on the Spanish sibilants appeared as Uriel Weinreich's dissertation was completed, and it makes clear in principle how languages as systems can be changed by contact with a substrate. One possibility, as Weinreich points out, is that forms of speech may 'crystallize' as a 'new language'. Examples are 'hybrid languages, such as the Creoles and pidgins'; and also what he describes as 'practically an intermediate language between the dialect', in lower Germany, 'and Standard German'. Languages, in Weinreich's definition, are 'IN CONTACT if they are used alternately by the same person'. Now for a structural linguist, when two languages come into contact, the effects of contact are observed first in the speech of people who use both. Antoine Meillet had notoriously claimed that 'the grammatical systems of two languages' were 'impenetrable to each other'; others quite the opposite.