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Migration and Language Change

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Demographic and Socioeconomic Basis of Ethnolinguistics

Abstract

The volume and direction of migration, the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the migrants, the causes of migration, and the consequences for the origin and destination areas are central interests of demographers, as they are for some sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists. The history of humans from earliest times to the present has been characterized by virtually continuous migration of masses of people moving from one area to another for economic and a variety of other reasons. Migration between nations has become especially common in recent decades. The increase in the volume of migration has been accompanied by an increase in public and professional interest in the subject, considered both with respect to the social and economic characteristics of the migrants and their motivations and patterns of integration into the host societies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Silverstein (2013) questions why this recent migratory event is described as “super” when similar mass migrations have occurred in the past. He notes, for example, that Great Britain has experienced a long history of migratory transitions and invasions, including those of the Germanic tribes in the fifth century and the Normans in the eleventh century.

  2. 2.

    These statements should be qualified. From the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) , one can derive country of birth of each individual in multigenerational households and link children with parents, grandparents, and even great grandparents, if they are living in the same household. So, for example, if grandparents are reported as foreign-born, the parents as native, and the children as native, we know that the grandparents are the immigrants, the parents are second generation natives, and the children are third generation natives. However, such data are limited to households in which the generations live together and omit, among others, all those persons who are living in their own households and are not living with their parents or children.

  3. 3.

    Migration distance from southern Africa has been shown to be related to language structure, specifically the number of phonemes in a language (Atkinson 2011). (Phonemes are the combinations of consonants, vowels, and tones that are the simplest structural elements in a language in terms of sounds.) Atkinson analyzed the sounds in some 500 languages throughout the world and observed that, the fewer the number of phonemes a language uses, the farther the speakers had to travel from southern Africa to reach their destination. He illustrates this generalization with Hawaiian , which has only 13 phonemes, English, which has 45, and some of the click-sounding languages of Africa, which have over 100. Atkinson infers from this finding that modern human language must have originated in southern Africa. This inference is consistent with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA. This finding is also consistent with the evidence that migration distance from Africa is related to a decrease in genetic diversity among populations.

  4. 4.

    The 1969 Organization of African Unity Convention defines a refugee as any person compelled to leave his or her country “owing to external aggression, occupation , foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order in either part or the whole of his country of origin or nationality.” The 1984 Cartagena Convention states that refugees also include persons who flee their country “because their lives, security or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violations of human rights or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order.”

  5. 5.

    Communicative interactions between British officials and South East Asian immigrants are also affected by the strained social relations resulting from the former colonial status of the East Indians under British rule. A linguistic handbook for British colonial administrators once provided instruction to them on how to recognize disrespectful language among the population and, when observed, how to deal with it.

  6. 6.

    Ladino is basically a Romance language, derived from medieval Spanish, but it employs the Hebrew alphabet /script and some other elements from Hebrew . Like Yiddish , Ladino varies slightly from country to country as it incorporated elements from each local language.

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    Jacob S. Siegel

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Siegel, J.S. (2018). Migration and Language Change. In: Demographic and Socioeconomic Basis of Ethnolinguistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61778-7_12

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