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8 - Multilingualism in India, Southeast Asia, and China

from Part One - Multilingualism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2022

By
Tej K. Bhatia
Edited by
Salikoko Mufwene  and
Anna Maria Escobar
Salikoko Mufwene
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Anna Maria Escobar
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

There are a few hundred known sign languages around the world, and in such language communities, multilingualism is the norm. This multilingualism traverses modalities: signed, written, and, in some cases, spoken forms of language. Such a linguistic landscape inevitably leads to various forms of language contact between languages, including contact between two or more signed languages (characterised by lexical borrowing), signed language and spoken language (characterised by mouthings), and signed language and written language (characterised by fingerspelling, initialized fingerspelling). This chapter also covers sign language interference, code switching and code mixing, and the concept of bimodal bilingualism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of pidginization and creolization of sign languages and sign language endangerment, as well as general comments on the characteristics of contact between signed languages.

Keywords

IndiaChinaSoutheast AsiaSanskritHinduismIndian and Chinese BuddhismNatural bi-/multilingualismlanguage contact and changelanguage ecologysuper-diversity.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
Volume 2: Multilingualism in Population Structure
 , pp. 201 - 227
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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