Language Contact, Structural Shift and Structural Borrowability:Evidence from Oroqen, Qiang and Tsat

Frank Li
CSU-Chico

Oroqen is a Tungusic language spoken in Northeast of China and Inner Mongolia. Qiang is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Sichuan province of inland China. Tsat is an Ausstronesian language spoken on Hainan Island in Southeast China. A considerable amount of data from those three genetically unrelated languages reveal patterns that shed light on our understanding of the complex interplay between language contact and structural change across languages. All three languages have undergone drastic restructuring over a relatively short time span of a few decades. I demonstrate that time depth and intensity of contact correlate very closely with the rate and extent of structural borrowing and structural shift that occurred in those languages. I argue that the determining factors are sociolinguistic in nature though some of the changes were initially internally motivated.