A hugely important mechanism for language change is intermarriage: a husband and wife who grew up speaking different languages; one of them learned the other’s language imperfectly; and that’s the language they generally speak to each other.
If you have lots of couples in the same situation in a given village, children will learn some of the “mistakes” they hear, and interpret them as “correct.” They grow up speaking to each other in this way, pass this on to their own kids, and voila – it is correct.
These changes tend to be “simplifying” ones (loss of verb inflections, reduction of consonant clusters…)…but, over centuries, there are often (not always) compensating “complicating” changes in some other aspect of the language. (Remember, complexity really means redundancy, and some amount of redundancy is a GOOD thing. Communication is physically imperfect – noisy rooms, wax in your ears, etc. – so we need redundancy to communicate.)
What causes many villages to have many non-native-speakers among its husbands or wives around the same time? Mass migration – which often comes during or soon after a military invasion (but there are other mechanisms as well).
?? “down to individual letters” ??
Arabic was not imposed on the populations in the Islamic conquests. It was the administration language but it only spread slowly and only replaced the native local languages systematically in the realms of its language cousins, the afro-asiatic languages.
Arabic did not replace all languages in the areas it administered, but it filtered down from the top and eventually became the default native language, especially in areas where other semitic languages had been present. Some survived, some did not. When it swept beyond semitic language areas in the early years, a great deal of borrowing was done in both directions.
I am sorry but what you quote is wrong and badly expressed.
The alphabet in Arabic for the standard arabic is not changed, only for dialects and only in some regions are any added letters innovated (not adopted only the sounds entered into arabic from the language contact).
What you wrote was wrong. It was not very much imposed as the language of the populace, it like other imperial languages penetrated from use in the administration. there is no great sign that the arab imperial administration cared about the language of the population, and this remained so for centuries and centuries.
The mention of the malay the swahili and the Hausa show great confusion as the adoption of arabic alphabet there has very little or nothing to do with the arab conquest and is about influence from religious usage, not the arab conquest (altough a little bit for the coastal enclaves applies to the swahili).
Sounds like you’re referring to this famous experiment. (I could have sworn that there was another, similar famous experiment dealing with size; but if there is, I’m blanking on the name right now.)
I don’t think that’s true. In fact, I’d expect them to be a recent development, given their complexity. They possibly emerged just as a simplification or consonant clusters, though I’ve also seen a hypothesis that they spread (and the presence of click consonants is an areal feature almost exclusive to eastern and southern Africa) as a way of avoiding taboo words.
… I’ve always heard the term lingua franca in reference to the first item you mention, trade. Why would that particular one have to be related to slavery?
I didn’t say that it was related to slavery. I said that the examples of pidgins and creoles that I’ve heard of were EITHER related to trade OR to slavery. In the case of a lingua franca, which is one type of pidgins and creoles, they are related to trade.
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A non-slavery example comes from Pinker’s The Language Instinct, in which he tells of workers who came from all over to Hawaii first developing a pidgin so they could work and do business with each other, then their children developed more complex grammatical rules and turned it into a creole. Of course, this was still based on trade in that trade is the main way people from different cultures interact.
Interesting book, at least when compared with his The Blank Slate. Respectful of Chomsky without being worshipful. I give it a nine.
I’ve always heard the term lingua franca in reference to the first item you mention, trade. Why would that particular one have to be related to slavery?