Incipient Bilingualism

The past decade has seen a flurry of activity in the field of language contact, with the result that we now have many descriptive studies and several valuable theoretical reviews of the field which serve to stimulate and guide further inquiry. One of the suggestions repeatedly pressed on the reader of Weinreich's Languages in contact and Haugen's Bilingualism in the Americas is the necessity of interdisciplinary research in studying the so-called extralinguistic factors which abound in any consideration of this subject. To be sure, linguists have made great strides in their principal area of interest in language contact, viz. the study of linguistic borrowing. But these studies have been by and large descriptive of the linguistic results of language contact. They are not so much interested in the behavior which accounts for the observed changes (say, between two historical stages of a language) as they are in identifying and tabulating the changes. Excellent documentation of the range of variability of these linguistic results is unfortunately matched by little knowledge concerning the social factors which effect their inception.