ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the long-term effects of bilingualism and addresses the following overarching question: How do languages change in contact with other languages? Contact-induced change refers to cases where the functions and structures of two languages in contact come to overlap, or converge, not from accidental similarity but as the ultimate result of cognitive mechanisms that are constantly at play in the bilingual mind such as conceptual transfer, a phenomenon discussed in Chapter 3, and implicit priming, a mechanism discussed in Chapter 1. In this chapter, “borrowing” will be defined as the transfer of sound and form-meaning units, like words. Borrowings start at the level of the bilingual language user and then spread throughout a language community as language users accommodate to one another (Chapter 5), with the result that borrowings can become anchored in a recipient language as loanwords (see Chapter 4). The same cognitive mechanisms can bring language users to find overlap between their languages outside their vocabularies. We discuss examples of the outcomes of language contact on the meaning and structures of various languages that result from convergence.
