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Cultures and Languages in Contact: Towards a Typology
The Typological Thrust
When we consider cultures and languages in contact, two points become immediately obvious. First, the most insistent and the most salient contexts are those involving societies of unequal power and dominance. This suggests that special attention to those interactions involving minority groups will be the most revealing, if only because minority–majority relationships tend to throw into high relief phenomena that are sometimes not so clearly seen in less highly charged settings. Second, the uniqueness of every setting does not arise because the elements of it are found nowhere else – rather, it arises because of the particular combinations and weightings of features that are, in themselves, commonly observed across a range of social situations. And, when features and dimensions recur across contexts, it is surely reasonable to think about putting them into some typological order. Indeed, despite what some critics have noted (see below), it is hard to see how careful work here could fail to be useful. Even modest descriptive undertakings could repay the effort; as Ferguson (1991: 230) pointed out:
it is frustrating to read a stimulating case study and find that it lacks information on what the reader regards as some crucial points … what I have in mind is not so much a well developed theoretical frame of reference as something as simple as a checklist of points to be covered.
In this chapter, ...
