Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a common and complex endocrine condition. Its heterogeneous expression creates diagnostic, treatment and management challenges for both health professionals and affected women. In girls with PCOS, the weight-gain trajectory deviates in early adolescence, creating momentum toward early onset metabolic disease. Excess weight in women with PCOS starts at an earlier age, increases at a greater rate and is commonly centrally located when compared to women without PCOS. Women with PCOS are also at higher risk of reproductive disorders such as infertility. In addition, an interplay of physiological and social factors place affected women at a greater risk of a range of emotional challenges. Despite the significant health burden of PCOS, women report delayed diagnosis and unsatisfactory information and support provision. In particular, they report difficulties in accessing clear guidance and ongoing support on necessary lifestyle changes.

This chapter outlines the evolution of Englishes outside of the British Isles, with particular attention to exploitation colonies. It looks at contact between the English-speaking and indigenous language communities during Britain’s trade and colonization ventures from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries but also highlights circumstances predating British colonization often overlooked in the field, comprising a larger group of players, in a chain of contact, such as that among various Asian communities, and with the Portuguese. Features such as tone, particles, and mixed codes are discussed; although traditionally regarded as the outcome of imperfect learning, such restructuring illustrates how, with diverse ecologies and typologies, there are no constraints on the typology of the emergent World Englishes (WEs) varieties. Also underscored is the fact that the dynamics and outcomes of contact in WEs are not distinct from those observed in scenarios in which creole languages evolve. The chapter concludes by evaluating the current and future evolution of English from contemporary contact ecologies, including computer-mediated communication, the language teaching industry, and trade.

INTRODUCTION

Globalisation – the process by which regional economies, societies and cultures have become integrated through a global network of trade, communication, immigration and transportation – has, as a word, existed since the 1960s. While in the more recent past globalisation was often primarily focused on the economic side of the world, and was the term initially widely used by economists and other social scientists, it now encompasses a broader range of areas and activities, including culture, media, technology, sociocultural, political and even biological factors, such as climate change. The term achieved such widespread use in the mainstream press by the late 1980s that, in the new millennium, many ask if ‘globalisation’ has become a global cliché (Lechner and Boli 2004). Nonetheless, even the more critical of observers accept that the processes associated with globalisation, while not new in substance, are certainly new in intensity, scope and scale (Coupland 2010a). And, even if linguists have been ‘late getting to the party’, as noted by Nikolas Coupland (2003), one of the earlier scholars in language and globalisation, research in the field has certainly burgeoned (see e.g. Coupland 2010b).

Several phenomena associated with the globalised era have been identified by scholars, mentioned in Chapter 1 and reiterated here (from Coupland 2010a: 2–3, excerpted, reordered and numbered here):

1. i. the decline of the (British) Establishment;

2. ii. national boundaries becoming (perhaps until recently) more permeable;

3. iii. massively increasing demographic mobility, often for economic reasons;

4. iv. developing ethnic pluralism, especially in urban settings;

5. v. the proliferation and speeding up of communication technologies;

6. vi. the growth of the middle class but the accentuation of the rich/poor divide;

7. vii. an upsurge in consumer culture and many new forms of commodification;

8. viii. greater subservience to global market economics, in the face of its demerits;

9. ix. a large shift to service-sector work, globally dispersed.

Each of the above has implications for bringing communities and their languages into contact with each other in new, contemporary contexts which, to echo Coupland, are contexts that are distinct from those of the past in terms of intensity, scope and scale.

INTRODUCTION

When we move beyond creole genesis and look at the ways in which languages change over time, we realise we are actually contemplating a much bigger question. With our increasing understanding of linguistic diversity, one of the most challenging questions faced by modern linguistics is to explain how and why human societies have come to be characterised by such different linguistic systems over time. Does language contact play any role in the evolution of diversity? In this chapter we present two approaches that tackle this question.

THE CREOLE PROTOTYPE

Continuing on the discussion in Chapter 3, this chapter presents the most recent developments in the field of creole theory and contact language formation.

Probably the most debated approach to creole genesis since Bickerton, John McWhorter's (1998) ‘Creole Prototype’ (CP) develops a view of creole languages as a synchronically definable typological class, with a unique set of structural criteria. The data sample on which the CP is based includes eight languages which constitute examples of ‘typical’ creoles – that is, natively spoken languages that were allegedly created via rapid adoption as a lingua franca by slave populations five hundred years ago or less. These are Ndjuka English Creole, Tok Pisin English Creole, Saramaccan English Creole, Haitian French Creole, St Lucian French Creole, Mauritian French Creole, Fa D'Ambu and Negerhollands Dutch Creole. The three structural features shared uniquely by creoles postulated by McWhorter (1998, 2000, 2011) are the following.

1. i. Minimal use of inflectional affixation. This is defined as the most salient feature of typical creole languages which, McWhorter claims, rarely have more than one or two inflectional affixes. For example, while Tok Pisin has two – the transitive marker -im and the marker -pela for adjectivehood (Mühlhäusler 1985) – Fa D'Ambu has one, which is marginally productive (Post 1994), and Negerhollands has one inflection – sini for plurality, which is optional. In addition, McWhorter claims that the inflectional affixes are always monomorphemic, and paradigms of allomorphs are not found in creoles. This he explains as the result of the stripping down of a system for its optimal learnability and processability.

2. […]

INTRODUCTION

On 26 December 2004, an undersea earthquake occurred in the Indian Ocean with an epicentre off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. At 9.0 on the Richter scale, it triggered a series of tsunamis along the coasts of most landmasses bordering the Indian Ocean, which inundated coastal communities with waves up to thirty metres, and killed more than 230,000 people in fourteen countries. Close to the epicentre, most of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands – an archipelago of 572 islands in the Bay of Bengal between Myanmar and Indonesia – were devastated. As it was feared that North Sentinel Island, one of the Andaman Islands, would also have been swamped, an Indian Coast Guard rescue helicopter was sent to check on casualties. A single naked bowman emerged from the forest and fired arrows to drive the helicopter away. This made the news, not only for the fact that the Sentinelese had survived the tsunami. What piqued the world's interest then – and continues to do so – was the existence of a ‘Stone Age’ tribe (as it came to be dubbed), numbering about 250, thought to be directly descended from the first human populations to emerge from Africa. The tribespeople were estimated to have lived on the Andaman Islands for up to 60,000 years, but with very little contact with the outside world for thousands of years. That their language is so different even from other Andaman Islanders suggests this lack of contact; that they continue to actively and violently reject any form of outside incursion or contact suggests they prefer it this way.

News of ‘uncontacted peoples’ such as the Sentinelese – that is, communities who live, or have lived, either by choice or by circumstance, without significant contact with globalised civilisation – never fails to garner the world's attention. The idea of having no contact with any other community, especially in today's global world, strikes most as incredible, in all respects. After all, contact between communities, and their languages, is such a fundamental human experience, one which has been occurring since almost the beginning of humanity – an experience which by the very nature of human beings involves communication. It is of small wonder, then, that the study of languages in contact is of interest to many.

INTRODUCTION

The question of why and how speakers in contact have, in specific contexts, created entire new languages with unique grammatical features occupies an important place in the field of language contact. The diversity of approaches this question has received, and the complexity of creole contexts itself, has led to a lively and at times controversial debate in creole studies. Some of the fundamental questions that creolists have grappled with include the following.

1. i. Why do contact languages, and especially creoles, arise in the first place?

2. ii. How are the new grammatical systems arrived at?

3. iii. Which original languages of the contact situation influenced the new varieties most and why?

In attempting to answer these and other complex questions, a number of proposals have been put forward, including the following.

1. i. Creole grammars reflect the expressions of innate constraints produced of sheer communicative necessity.

2. ii. Creoles can be seen as continuations or dialects of their lexifier (superstrate) languages.

3. iii. Creole grammars are based on their substrate languages.

4. iv. Creoles are instances of second language (L2) transfer.

While some of these claims are compatible with each other, others are somewhat exclusive, a situation that has led to a number of controversies. This chapter is devoted to explaining and discussing these different positions. It is important to realise that what essentially distinguishes the different approaches is a matter of focus. In order to clarify this, the discussion in this chapter proceeds by focusing in the following sections on the role of Universal Grammar, the continuity of lexifier influences, the role of substrate grammars and language transfer in a plurilingual context. In the last section we discuss the more substantial arguments offered in favour of and against each stance. More recent theoretical developments in the field, including the notion of hybridity and evolutionary approaches to contact language formation (CLF), are discussed in Chapter 4.

FOCUS ON UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR

A number of theoretical approaches share the assumption that creole languages emerge out of pidgin languages through a process of nativisation. This position was explicitly taken by Hall (1966: xiv), who developed the notion of the pidgin–creole life cycle. In this model, a pidgin is regarded as having emerged as a vehicle of communication amongst people who lacked a common language.

INTRODUCTION

At the outset of this book we underlined the significant role that ecology plays in the study of languages in contact. The ecology paradigm, a metaphor from population genetics and biology, has been developed most recently in linguistic study by Salikoko Mufwene (2001, 2008). The earliest instances of its invocation – Voegelin, Voegelin and Schutz (1967) and Haugen (1971), and later Mühlhäusler (1996) – use it in the sense of the social environment in which a language is spoken. Mufwene (2001: 153) is also influenced by its usage in macroecology as a cover term for diverse factors which are both external and internal to a species and bear on its evolution. These include population size, habitat requirements and genetic variation, as well as differences in initial conditions, stochastic (i.e. random) events, time lags, processes operating on different time scales and spatial subdivisions.

In this chapter we engage in a detailed examination of the role of ecology behind two linguistic features: particles and tone. These features are germane to this book because they are extremely susceptible to contact. But, even more pertinently for this chapter, we highlight how a full appreciation of what happens with particles and tone requires us to look at the external factors which construe the ecology that creates the conditions for the dynamics of contact, and the close interplay between them. More specifically, we demonstrate how the identification of the substrates for certain features needs to call on an examination of demographic factors such as immigration patterns and population make-up at different points in time, as well as language policy. We also see how the founder principle in the ecology paradigm helps to shed light on otherwise puzzling patterns in the restructured variety.

These linguistic features are extremely interesting to examine because they are features which can be seen to be quite distinctive for Asia. They are not exclusive to Asia, of course: particles are found in numerous languages of the world, and virtually all languages in Africa are tonal, with several clusters of languages with tones occurring in South, Central and North America.

THE STATE OF OUR FIELD

In conceptualising and developing the themes of our book, we have made an effort to be forward looking, as well as eastward minded, in order to present fresh – at times challenging – theoretical views and offer novel empirical content. It seems therefore apt at this point to look back and ask ourselves where we have come to in the field of contact linguistics.

The study of language contact can hardly ever be dissociated from one thinker in particular who, in a short lifespan, made impressive contributions: Uriel Weinreich, mentioned at the outset of this book. Credited by many as the father of modern contact linguistics, his views have time and again proven to be some of the most insightful of our field. As we are now six decades beyond the date of his most influential publication, Languages in Contact (1953), we take Weinreich's legacy as the benchmark for our field and for the contributions of this very volume. From a methodological point of view, Weinreich had already established a tradition that continues to this date – namely an intimate relationship between contact and sociolinguistics. His work was to be of great influence for William Labov (Kim 2011) and established early on an important fact: that solid contact linguistics must be closely related to the study of social, cultural and political issues. The outcomes of language contact, which Weinreich calls 'interference’, were to be in large part understood on the basis of social variables, demographic as well as historical factors, gender and race, and institutional as well as political functions. In this respect, Thomason and Kaufman's (1988) model of contact, while paying close attention to structural issues in language contact, also reinforces the notion of sociohistorical dynamics as the fundamental explanatory dimension in the study of borrowing and shift.

Thomason and Kaufman also argue against the possibility of structural constraints as an explanatory dimension. Following in these eminent footsteps, our own contribution can be seen as basically a work of sociolinguistic nature, albeit focused on contact.

INTRODUCTION

One of the outcomes of languages and speakers coming into contact is increased multilingualism. It is worth identifying systematically the various scenarios that bring communities together and that put the pressure on adding language varieties to the repertoire. This chapter then proceeds to outline how, in such situations where more than one code is present, these codes may be (a) distributed in society and (b) exploited by the community. In the final section we examine some of the more recent, postmodern approaches which deconstruct the notion of multilingualism.

There was once a prevailing belief in some quarters that having more than one language in one's individual or collective repertoire could be considered a liability. Nineteenth-century nationalists promoted the ‘one nation = one language’ ideology, and even in contemporary times such an ideology persists. Theodore Roosevelt, as President of the United States of America, in 1906 declared: ‘We have room for but one language in this country, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.’ The motto of the Alliance for the Preservation of English in Canada is ‘one language unites, two divide’. Such a monolingual perspective is a consequence of the possession of a powerful language of wider communication, accompanied by narrow cultural awareness and reinforced by state policies, which elevate one language to official status.

The stereotypical concept of multilinguals held by many in the US, Myers-Scotton (2006: 4) tells us, has been an exotic one. A multilingual is envisioned as a child either of European nobility (that is, from Transylvania, Monaco or another exotic locale) or of refugees (namely from Argentina, Chile or Russia), or, in more contemporary times, as a migrant worker (read: some Spanish speakers) or small businessman (read: Korean grocer or South Asian motel manager/owner). And for Europeans from single-language-policy nations, being multilingual usually meant, until recently, being one of a prestigious few from a higher class with formal language education (thus speaking Latin, French and German). More unusual multilingual repertoires, as noted by Edwards (1994: 34–5), include the following impressive examples. The chief curator in the Vatican Library, Giuseppe Mezzofanti (1774–1849), reportedly spoke 60 languages fluently and could translate more than 150 languages and dialects.

On a little dot of a tropical island in Southeast Asia just above the equator, a decade and a half ago, the Department of English Language and Literature of the National University of Singapore witnessed an encounter between two colleagues, one newly hired. Neither imagined that that contact would lead to any output of substance or significance, for the simple reason that they came from very different academic backgrounds and had, at that point, minimal knowledge or interest in the other's fields. One had trained as a phonetician and was working on a New English in the World Englishes paradigm. The other was a creolist and typologist specialising in Sinitic varieties. A standing joke was that we would never be talking about work when we got together outside office hours, so distinct and compartmentalised were our interests and expertise.

This ontological anecdote underlines the essence of this book. The studies of pidgin and creole languages on the one hand and World Englishes on the other are almost always written about as separate animals; an exception is John Platt, whose writing in the 1970s and 1980s did integrate the study of New Englishes with pidgin and creole studies, as is, more recently, Bao Zhiming. One primary aim of this book was indeed to bring our collective expertise in our respective fields together in an integrated view, such that what is common and com-parable in the sociolinguistic factors and structural processes involved in the evolution of contact varieties – whether creoles, New Englishes or mixed codes – might be recognised. Our discussions in the early years planted the seed. Half a dozen years at the University of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication – in particular our engagement with colleagues in the Language Creation and the Sociolinguistics and Multilingualism groups and other scholars in Europe and the US, who were doing critical, cutting-edge research – profoundly influenced our thinking, especially in developing an ana-lysis of New Englishes from a contact perspective. That being said, it might still appear surprising to the reader that it is a mere two chapters that appear to be dedicated to pidgin and creole languages and linguistics, these being the cornerstone of the study of languages in contact, when the majority of books in the field usually devote themselves entirely to them.