Syntactic mixing across generations in an environment of community-wide bilingualism

Abstract

A quantitative analysis of a trans-generational, conversational corpus of Chintang (Tibeto-Burman) speakers with community-wide bilingualism in Nepali (Indo-European) reveals that children show more code-switching into Nepali than older speakers. This confirms earlier proposals in the literature that code-switching in bilingual children decreases when they gain proficiency in their dominant language, especially in vocabulary. Contradicting expectations from other studies, our corpus data also reveal that for adults, multi-word insertions of Nepali into Chintang are just as likely to undergo full syntactic integration as single-word insertions. Speakers of younger generations show less syntactic integration. We propose that this reflects a change between generations, from strongly asymmetrical, Chintang-dominated bilingualism in older generations to more balanced bilingualism where Chintang and Nepali operate as clearly separate systems in younger generations. This change is likely to have been triggered by the increase of Nepali presence over the past few decades.

Automatic interlinear glossing as two-level sequence classification

“…The language labels are needed because mixing with other languages (Nepali and Bantawa) is frequent in Chintang (Stoll et al, 2015).…”

“…2 We divide the traditional glossing procedure into several steps and define an automatic processing pipeline, which consists of some standard and some custom natural language processing tasks. The data we use for our experiments come from the Chintang Language Corpus (Bickel et al, 2004(Bickel et al, 2015, an exceptionally large glossed corpus, which has been developed since 2004 and is presently hosted at the Department of Comparative Linguistics at the University of Zurich. 3…”

Does morphological complexity affect word segmentation? Evidence from computational modeling

“…Moreover, since Chintang is spoken in a multilingual setting, annotators transcribed all speech including non-Chintang words, either because they are recent loanwords or because of code-switching into Nepali. Most Chintang speakers are bilingual in the morphologically simpler Nepali and children encounter Nepali from early on(Stoll, Zakharko, Moran, Schikowski & Bickel, 2015). In fact, 36% of the Chintang utterances had non-Chintang single-or multi-word insertions.…”

Indigenous children’s language: Acquisition, preservation and evolution of language in minority contexts

“…The Language Documentation movement has toiled tirelessly in the pursuit of documenting languages before they disappear, an effort to which child language researchers have much to offer. Many children acquire smaller and minority languages in rich multilingual environments, where the influence of dominant languages affects acquisition (e.g., Stoll, Zakharko, Moran, Schikowski, & Bickel, 2015). Understanding the acquisition process where systems compete and may be in flux due to language contact, while no small task, will help us understand the social and economic conditions which favour successful preservation of minority languages, which could ultimately equip communities with the tools to stem the flow of language loss.…”