Migration and Language Contact
Almost daily now we see headlines about migrants who are fleeing the violence in Syria and who are making their way into Europe and elsewhere with the hope that they might find safety in a better place. Many of these folk entertain the idea that once things settle down they might be able to return to their homeland. Others, perhaps because of trauma or devastating loss, may be resolved to stay where they finally land and to make for themselves a new life in a new location.
Migration is not a new phenomenon and it isn't always motivated by war. Some migration is motivated by natural disaster, as things like tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, or floods destroy homes and livelihoods requiring people to flee to safer locations, sometimes permanently. In other cases, people may be required to move by fiat of a government or through the acquisition of their lands by private businesses (legitimately or illegitimately). It may be the case that "development"--the building of dams or the creation of new towns and cities--may displace a population. Migrations of peoples from long ago have largely shaped our understanding of what the "native" languages of a region are. If you go back far enough, almost everybody came from somewhere else. The movement of English, Spanish, and French speakers across the Atlantic from Europe to the Americas, for example, has drastically changed the language ecologies of the Western hemisphere. More recent and smaller migrations have further shaped the linguistic environments in which we live as well.
Whatever the cause, the movement of people also means the movement of languages from their original geographic locations to new locations and to new language ecologies. Where once users of the language may have been in contact with speakers of a specific set of other languages, in the new context, they are interacting with a very different configuration of speakers and their languages.
These changes in the linguistic environment, studied by linguists as "contact linguistics" and by sociolinguists as "language ecology," result in changes in the languages themselves. Look at the influence that Spanish is having on English in contact zones in North America, for example, and perhaps even more obviously, that English is having on Spanish in both border areas and urban centers.
As we think about the influx of refugees and safety-seekers in Europe, we can expect to see some significant modifications in the language repertoires of the migrants as Arabic speakers learn German and French and English, as their children may become more proficient in those second languages than they are in their mother-tongue (and certainly more proficient than their parents and grandparents), and as the vocabulary and structure of both the Arabic and the German that the migrants speak is altered by the new kinds and increased level of contact between a variety of different languages.
These contact phenomena touch on the well-known and oft-studied feature of linguistic variation and the implications of that variation for language identification. When is a contact variety so altered by the influence of a second language that it might no longer be considered to be the same language as the more standard variety spoken in the homeland? We often see references in the press to contact varieties that are the result of longer-term contact between different languages, varieties such as Spanglish, Franglish, Singlish (Singaporean English), Manglish (Malay-English), and other hybridized "dialects" which may at some point be judged to be so different from "standard" English as to be identified as separate languages (much like Spanish, French, and Italian split off from Vulgar Latin centuries ago).
Migration, however, also challenges us to keep track of the inventory of languages within any given country's borders. Ethnologue organizes its presentation of the languages of the world as entries that describe a "language in country." We have generally given only very summary data about "immigrant" languages in each country, but as the number, populations, and influence of immigrant languages grows both quantitatively and qualitatively, being able to provide an accurate description of the presence of immigrant languages within a country's borders becomes more important and useful. With populations on the move in such large numbers and in so many different directions as they now are, we face significant challenges to our ability to accurately provide the relevant data.
We are redoubling our efforts to get more up-to-date data but the statistics, like the people themselves, are on the move.