Relexification
Encyclopedia
Relexification is a term in linguistics
used to describe the mechanism of language change
by which one language
replaces much or all of its lexicon
, including basic vocabulary, with that of another language, without drastic change to its grammar. It is principally used to describe pidgin
s, creoles
, and mixed language
s. Relexification is not synonymous with lexical borrowing
, which describes the situation where a language merely supplements its basic vocabulary with words from another language.
, a creole
or a mixed language
takes the great majority of its lexicon from a superstrate or target language
while its grammar either comes from the substrate
or source language, or, according to universalist
theories, arises from universal principles of simplification and grammaticalisation. The language from which the lexicon is derived is called the "lexifier". Michif, Media Lengua
, and Karipúna are mixed languages which arose through relexification.
A hypothesis that all creole languages derive their grammar
from the medieval Mediterranean Lingua Franca
was widely held at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s before falling out of favor. It was later argued that, for example, the grammar of Haitian creole is a substratum, created when Fon
-speaking African slaves relexified their language with French vocabulary, because of underlying similarities between Haitian and Fon. However, the role of relexification in creole genesis is disputed by adherents of generative grammar
, itself a highly disputed concept. , , , and , for example, have argued that the similarities in syntax reflect a hypothetical Universal Grammar
, not the workings of relexification processes.
s) involves the gradual relexification of the native language or source language with target language
vocabulary. After relexification is completed, native language structures alternate with structures acquired from the target language.
s, jargon
s, and argot
s, the term is applied to the process of creating a language by substituting new vocabulary into the grammar of an existing language, often one's native language.
While this practice is most often associated with novice constructed language designers, it may also be done as an initial stage towards creating a more sophisticated language. A language thus created is known as a relex. For instance, Lojban
began as a relex of Loglan
, but the languages' grammars have diverged since then. The same process is at work in the genesis of jargon
s and argot
s. Examples of this are:
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
used to describe the mechanism of language change
Language change
Language change is the phenomenon whereby phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of language vary over time. The effect on language over time is known as diachronic change. Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern themselves with studying language change:...
by which one language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
replaces much or all of its lexicon
Lexicon
In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...
, including basic vocabulary, with that of another language, without drastic change to its grammar. It is principally used to describe pidgin
Pidgin
A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...
s, creoles
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
, and mixed language
Mixed language
A mixed language is a language that arises through the fusion of two source languages, normally in situations of thorough bilingualism, so that it is not possible to classify the resulting language as belonging to either of the language families that were its source...
s. Relexification is not synonymous with lexical borrowing
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
, which describes the situation where a language merely supplements its basic vocabulary with words from another language.
Language Creation and the Relexification Hypothesis
Relexification is a form of language interference in which a pidginPidgin
A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...
, a creole
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
or a mixed language
Mixed language
A mixed language is a language that arises through the fusion of two source languages, normally in situations of thorough bilingualism, so that it is not possible to classify the resulting language as belonging to either of the language families that were its source...
takes the great majority of its lexicon from a superstrate or target language
Target language
Target language may refer to:*Target language, in applied linguistics and language education, the language which a person is learning, also called second language*Target language, in translation, the language to which a source text is translated...
while its grammar either comes from the substrate
Substratum
In linguistics, a stratum or strate is a language that influences, or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum is a language which has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum is the language that has higher power or prestige. Both substratum and superstratum...
or source language, or, according to universalist
Universal grammar
Universal grammar is a theory in linguistics that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have.Usually credited to Noam Chomsky, the theory suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest themselves without being taught...
theories, arises from universal principles of simplification and grammaticalisation. The language from which the lexicon is derived is called the "lexifier". Michif, Media Lengua
Media Lengua
Media Lengua is a language spoken in Salcedo, about 100 km south of Quito, Ecuador, by about 1,000 people of Native American ancestry. It is usually classified as a mixed language as it combines Spanish vocabulary with a Quechua grammatical system, most conspicuously morphology...
, and Karipúna are mixed languages which arose through relexification.
A hypothesis that all creole languages derive their grammar
Monogenetic theory of pidgins
According to the theory of monogenesis in its most radical form, all pidgins and creole languages of the world can be ultimately traced back to one linguistic variety. This idea was first formulated by Hugo Schuchardt in the late 19th century and popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by and...
from the medieval Mediterranean Lingua Franca
Mediterranean Lingua Franca
The Mediterranean Lingua Franca or Sabir was a pidgin language used as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean Basin from the 11th to the 19th century.-History:...
was widely held at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s before falling out of favor. It was later argued that, for example, the grammar of Haitian creole is a substratum, created when Fon
Fon language
Fon is part of the Gbe language cluster and belongs to the Volta–Niger branch of the Niger–Congo languages. Fon is spoken mainly in Benin by approximately 1.7 million speakers, by the Fon people...
-speaking African slaves relexified their language with French vocabulary, because of underlying similarities between Haitian and Fon. However, the role of relexification in creole genesis is disputed by adherents of generative grammar
Generative grammar
In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
, itself a highly disputed concept. , , , and , for example, have argued that the similarities in syntax reflect a hypothetical Universal Grammar
Universal grammar
Universal grammar is a theory in linguistics that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have.Usually credited to Noam Chomsky, the theory suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest themselves without being taught...
, not the workings of relexification processes.
Second language acquisition
Spontaneous second language acquisition (and the genesis of pidginPidgin
A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...
s) involves the gradual relexification of the native language or source language with target language
Target language
Target language may refer to:*Target language, in applied linguistics and language education, the language which a person is learning, also called second language*Target language, in translation, the language to which a source text is translated...
vocabulary. After relexification is completed, native language structures alternate with structures acquired from the target language.
Conlangs and jargon
In the context of constructed languageConstructed language
A planned or constructed language—known colloquially as a conlang—is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary has been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved naturally...
s, jargon
Jargon
Jargon is terminology which is especially defined in relationship to a specific activity, profession, group, or event. The philosophe Condillac observed in 1782 that "Every science requires a special language because every science has its own ideas." As a rationalist member of the Enlightenment he...
s, and argot
Argot
An Argot is a secret language used by various groups—including, but not limited to, thieves and other criminals—to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations. The term argot is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, hobby, job,...
s, the term is applied to the process of creating a language by substituting new vocabulary into the grammar of an existing language, often one's native language.
While this practice is most often associated with novice constructed language designers, it may also be done as an initial stage towards creating a more sophisticated language. A language thus created is known as a relex. For instance, Lojban
Lojban
See also discussed by Arthur Protin, Bob LeChevalier, Carl Burke, Doug Landauer, Guy Steele, Jack Waugh, Jeff Prothero, Jim Carter, and Robert Chassell, as well as , the concepts which "average English speakers won't recognize" because most of them "have no exact English counterpart".Like most...
began as a relex of Loglan
Loglan
Loglan is a constructed language originally designed for linguistic research, particularly for investigating the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. The language was developed beginning in 1955 by Dr James Cooke Brown with the goal of making a language so different from natural languages that people learning...
, but the languages' grammars have diverged since then. The same process is at work in the genesis of jargon
Jargon
Jargon is terminology which is especially defined in relationship to a specific activity, profession, group, or event. The philosophe Condillac observed in 1782 that "Every science requires a special language because every science has its own ideas." As a rationalist member of the Enlightenment he...
s and argot
Argot
An Argot is a secret language used by various groups—including, but not limited to, thieves and other criminals—to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations. The term argot is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, hobby, job,...
s. Examples of this are:
- CalóCaló (Spanish Romani)Caló is a language spoken by the Spanish and Portuguese Romani. It is a mixed language based on Romance grammar, with an adstratum of Romani lexical items through language shift by the Romani community. It is often used as an argot, a secret language for discreet communication amongst Iberian...
is a jargon used by Gitanos (Spanish Gypsies), that mixes a SpanishSpanish languageSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
grammar with Romany vocabulary.
- A literary example of relexification is the comical mock-Latin used by a character in James JoyceJames JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManA Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialised in the magazine The Egoist from 1914 to 1915, and published first in book format in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch, New York. The first English edition was published by the Egoist Press in February 1917...
:
-
- Ego credo ut vita pauperum est simpliciter atrox, simpliciter sanguinarius atrox, in Liverpoolio.
- I believe that the life of the poor is simply atrocious, simply bloody atrocious, in Liverpool.
Further reading
- Arends, Jacques, Pieter Muysken & Norval Smith. 1995. Pidgins and Creoles: an introduction. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
- Sebba, Mark. 1997. Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press.
- Speer, Rob & Catherine Havasi (2004), Meeting the Computer Halfway: Language Processing in the Artificial Language Lojban, Massachusetts Institute of Technology http://sow.lcs.mit.edu/2004/proceedings/Speer.pdf