Language emergence in multilingual contexts (Old ID 23509)

Chief Investigator

As European colonisation spread around the world, European languages infiltrated numerous areas, giving rise to new language varieties. Bringing indigenous people from various language groups together — on plantations, in missions and boarding schools — has resulted in creating new forms of dominant languages for inter-group communication, among them European-based Creoles (such as Tok Pisin, the English-based Creole, and the previously undescribed Unserdeutsch, a creolized variety of German, in PNG). New blended languages emerge, as communities come to live together. We focus on areas of high linguistic diversity covering New Guinea, Amazonia, and East Asia, in the context of multilingual situations.

01 Jan 2018 - 28 Feb 2020

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