ABSTRACT
Although interest in contact phenomena in languages is probably contemporaneous with human migration, it is safe to say that modern structural approaches to language contact start with the work of Weinreich (1964), half a century ago. Many of the theoretical issues that have occupied the energy of numerous scholars for the past half century can be found in that work, at least in broad strokes if not also in detail. In the same spirit we may date the scholarly interest in the contact phenomena in the varieties of English that have emerged in the wake of England’s empire building with the publication of Kachru (1982), at least in intensity. The two works are informed by contact phenomena of different types of what is now collectively called contact language – Weinreich (1964) by pidgins and creoles and Kachru (1982) by new varieties of English that have emerged in places where the majority of the residents speak languages other than English. Despite the fact that both English-based pidgins/creoles and New Englishes sport similar locally derived lexical and grammatical features, the two works have set different research agendas. In the early days, approaches to New Englishes were influenced by contact-linguistic theories. John Platt, one of the pioneers in the study of Singapore and Malaysia English, describes the basilectal variety of Singapore English as a ‘creoloid’ (Platt, 1975). As it matures, the field of World English has its own distinct research topics and a thriving scholarly literature. A cursory reading of recently published compilations in the relevant literatures will convince the reader of the different theoretical tenor between the two streams of scholarship; see, among many others, DeGraff (1999), Kortmann and Schneider (2004), Kachru, Kachru and Nelson (2006), Mesthrie and Bhatt (2008); Hickey (2010), Kirkpatrick (2010), Lefebvre (2011), and Filppula, Klemola and Sharma (2015). Linguists who study New Englishes tend to focus on the ethnolinguistic and sociolinguistic peculiarities of English in the colonial and postcolonial settings, with different degrees of attention being paid to novel grammatical features and their sources. Questions of genesis do not figure prominently on the research agenda. By contrast, pidgin and creole specialists have been pre-occupied with the question of origin, engaging in lively debates framed within the conceptual framework of structural linguistics (Bickerton, 1981, 1984; Muysken, 1981;
Keesing, 1988; Mufwene, 1996, Lefebvre, 1998, 2011; Corne, 1999; Siegel, 2000, 2008a; Chaudenson, 2001; Heine & Kuteva, 2003, 2005; Matras & Sakel, 2007; Matras, 2009; Bao, 2015). More recent developments in the two streams of contact-linguistic scholarship promise to narrow, if not converge, the two trajectories.
