Complexity and Language Contact: A Socio-Cognitive Framework

‘Restricted’ and ‘General’ Complexity Perspectives on Social Bilingualisation and Language Shift Processes

“…This perspective was also consistent with the perspective of authors in other fields, such as biology (Maturana & Varela, 2004) and theoretical physics itself (Prigogine & Stengers, 1979, 1992Bohm, 1980;Capra, 2002). I have laid out the foundations of my synthesis of what we might call 'figurational complexity' or 'complex figurational sociology' in a few works that have recently appeared in print, so I will forgo detailed explanation here (Bastardas, 2013(Bastardas, , 2013b(Bastardas, , 2014(Bastardas, , 2017.…”

“…Biological ecology helps us with its theoretical propositions and models (Margalef 1991, Allen & Hoekstra 2014), yet human 'languaging' (Maturana 2002) is clearly not a species and there was still a need to look beyond the initial analogies. This is what led me to postulate a 'sociocognitive' ecology for cases of language contact (Bastardas 1996(Bastardas , 2017, an ecology based not on a simple transposition of ideas and concepts from biological ecology, but rather on the propositions of Edgar Morin, David Bohm, Fritjof Capra, Norbert Elias, The Gulbenkian Comission (Wallerstein 1996), and other scholars working in the sociocultural sciences. This is the intellectual climate in which I sought, primarily, to draw on the various contributions of the authors mentioned above, in order to build a complexical and dynamic perspective that could offer an account of the factors affecting human language behaviour and its historical evolution.…”

“…These principles underlied my proposal to adopt an ecological framework and bring sociocomplexity into the study of language contact. The result, in practical form, was a dynamic, multi-layered 'orchestral' picture that can embrace the distinct domains underpinning human language activity and its interrelationships in order to gain a much better grasp of the factors affecting language behaviour and its historical evolution (see Bastardas 1996 and2017). Succinctly put in the typical parlance of sociology, my work has taken as central human language behaviour in situations of personal and/or social cultural contact and then examined its interrelationships with the sociocultural factors that might co-influence its configuration and development.…”