Introduction

Linguistic contact is universal. Working at a university with a diverse student and academic population means that I am in regular contact with speakers of other languages. The languages I have heard in the last two days have included Polish, Bulgarian, Romanian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and German, as well as more local language varieties. Most of the time, these everyday contacts have had no effect on my own linguistic behaviour beyond making me move closer to the Scottish Standard English end of my personal linguistic continuum than would be the case when interacting with native Scots or English speakers. But sometimes contact of this type has affected my linguistic behaviour considerably. More than twenty years ago, I lived in rural Norway. After I had learned the local language sufficiently, I found that I peppered my English with Norwegian words and phrases concerned with governmental and administrative structures, along with other cultural references. English equivalents existed; these were not exact enough, however, particularly in relation to their rules of behaviour, connection and outcome. There is no conceptual connection in any English-speaking country, for instance, which would produce the idea of a ‘Church and Education Ministry’. Interestingly, I did this ‘code switching’ (if it can actually be termed such) even when speaking to other native English speakers (who, if they were long-term residents in Norway, did the same). I also noticed that I was beginning to pronounce some English words as if they were Norwegian, so that a word like heart, which I would naturally pronounce /hart/, began to have a final retroflex consonant.

Contacts of this type are not, of course, particularly profound. It is possible to learn and use a few words and phrases of another language without that language affecting the way you speak your native language naturally. That does not mean, however, that all language contacts are of such comparative unimportance. Michif, spoken on the western prairie borderlands between the United States and Canada, appears to be a genuine mixture of Cree, the local language, and French, the language of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century trappers.