Language Contact, Language Awareness, and Multilingualism

Abstract

The article addresses the notion of language awareness in contact linguistics. The notion has recently become a focus in many neighboring disciplines such as language learning and teaching, multilingualism and multilingual identities, discursive aspects of multilingualism, heritage language research, early multilingualism, and some others. In contact linguistics language awareness has been dealt with mostly implicitly. The article takes the definition of language awareness (provided by Association of Language Awareness) as a point of departure and suggests that the link between language contacts and language awareness appears in the following topics: code-switching, multilingual conversation, and aspects of language choice; awareness of contact effects in language planning; language attitudes in multilingual communities; individual awareness and conscious use of contact-induced features; emergence of mixed languages; multilingual interaction and receptive multilingualism; multilingualism and emotions; and multilingual linguistic creativity. To date, there are few contact linguistic models that include language awareness. Some of them are discussed in the final section of the article: Heine and Kuteva’s (2005) notion of equivalence in contact-induced grammaticalization, Matras’ (2012) activity-oriented approach to multi- lingualism and probabilistic scale of awareness in various types of contact- induced effects, and Thomason’s (2007) idea of change by deliberate decision and negotiation as mechanisms of contact-induced language change.