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Consequences of contact: the social settings of bilingualism

Application summary

This project studies a multilingual West-African ecology, with Mano and Kpelle languages at its core, and its impact on the evolution of the individual languages. I propose an innovative methodology by developing a holistic program, combining a study of individual and language-level processes, synchrony and diachrony, ethnography, corpus study and experiment. I will first study stable contact effects of Kpelle on the Mano grammar resulting from a long history of sustained bilingualism. I will then turn to contact-induced change in the making, manifesting itself in the patterns of variation, including variation in bilingual child and adult speech and contact-induced register variation. The necessary social context will be given by a detailed ethnography of multilingual settings, from family to institution-mediated social settings, such as the Catholic Church. The theoretical novelty of the study is two-fold. First, I articulate the relationship between patterns of bilingual language acquisition and stable effects of language contact through a study of language socialization and language ideologies. Second, I propose the model of differential language contact, where specific registers of language (in particular, religious) play a role of locus, and then source, of further spreading of language contact effects.

This project has examined the contact situation between two Mande languages of Guinea, Mano and Kpelle, by using various methods and datasets, focusing on several linguistic parameters and involving a tight collaboration between specialists of these languages based in Finland and a native speaker based in Guinea. We used participant observation to study multilingual usage in a pharmacy, which also yielded methodological and deontological reflections (under revision in Language Documentation and Conservation). We collected data on valency patterns in Mano, Kpelle and Kono via a typological questionnaire feeding into a micro-typological study of Mande valency (Studies in Language, 2024). We collected a corpus of narrative retellings from children using an innovative prompt, an animated movie (Kirikou et la sorcière; accepted in First Language, book chapter). Most importantly, we developed an experimental protocol for the study of variation in reflexive constructions in multilingual individuals and connected reflexivity patterns to the speakers’ sociolinguistic background, having interviewed more than 120 speakers. We published papers focusing on production (Linguistics, 2024), comprehension patterns (Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2025) and theory (Syntactic Theory and Research, under review). We further reannotated a subset of these data to study variation in prosody (Language Variation and Change, under revision, and Linguistics, submitted). Such experimental approaches to contact-induced variation are an underdeveloped field of study, although they are a crucial window to understand the dynamics of contact-induced change. When it comes to the second aspect in the original proposal, language contact in church, a special issue on language contact in the religious domain will soon be published by the International Journal of the Sociology of Language and includes our contribution on the language use by the Mano Catholic community.

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