Reconstructing the life-cycle of a mixed language: An exploration of Ecuadoran Media Lengua

Abstract

Aims and objectives: This study explores the assertion that bilingual mixed languages are only diachronically stable if they are not spoken together with both of the contributing source languages. Ecuadoran Media Lengua, which combines all-Quichua morphosyntax with nearly all lexical roots replaced by Spanish-derived forms, coexists in three communities with both Spanish and Quichua, having arrived in each community in successive generations. Methodology and design: Trilingual speakers (Quichua, Media Lengua, Spanish) participated in four interactive tasks: speeded translation, speeded acceptability judgments, language classification, and lexical decision. Data and analysis: For each task, the calculated rate of separation of Quichua and Media Lengua was the response variable for a series of linear mixed-effects models, with community (and when appropriate, age group) as a fixed effect. Findings/conclusions: The results suggest that a mixed language spoken together with the languages that supplied both the lexical roots and the morphosyntax can maintain its integrity for a generation or two, but the perceptual boundaries circumscribing the mixed language eventually become more permeable. They point to a significant correlation between the chronology of language contacts and the perceptual stability of Media Lengua, which is greatest when the only competing language is Quichua, somewhat less when Spanish is acquired later as the second language, and lowest when Spanish is one of the early acquired or native languages alongside Quichua. Originality: This is the first attempt to test the putative diachronic stability of a mixed language by means of synchronic experimental data.

The contribution of grammar and lexicon to language switching costs: Examining contact-induced languages and their implications for theories of language representation

“… 4 A reviewer asks how so much data loss in the Media Lengua-Quichua condition can be reconciled with the argument that this is the most natural condition and the one that is easiest to process. Previous research employing an acceptability judgment task with Quichua and Media Lengua had found surprising amounts of accepted ungrammatical and rejected canonical sentences (Lipski, 2019b), which suggests that this effect may relate to stigma – a dimension that may be impossible to isolate in the current data set. Note that when participants showed a tendency for single-response bias, they were re-instructed after the Media Lengua-Quichua condition (and participants with low d’-scores were excluded by condition), which may explain why participants’ average accuracy was higher in the subsequent conditions.…”

“…While participants unfamiliar with speeded experiments may “repeatedly choose a single response (e.g., ‘correct,’ ‘language X,’ etc. ), irrespective of the stimuli” (Lipski, 2019b, p. 8), one can account for such issues by examining scores for accuracy and single-response bias (as applied in the comprehension task below) and by triangulating results from multiple tasks that require different skills. Note that linguists’ continued interest in Palenquero has groomed Colombian participants to respond in specific ways.…”

“…Particularly when stigmatized or contact-induced languages are involved, such questionnaire answers may also not prove helpful as it remains unclear whether participants who report speaking Quichua during their childhood are actually referring to Quichua or, rather, Media Lengua. This complicates re-constructing their linguistic background, particularly given the intricate linguistic and cultural mosaic characterizing both communities (e.g., Lipski, 2017, 2019b; Schwegler, 2011b). Since participants’ behavior in the tasks did not lend clear insights into their language dominance (Dussias et al, 2016), the results are presented without assigning participants into proficiency groups.…”

Pronouns, Interrogatives, and (Quichua-Media Lengua) Code-Switching: The Eyes Have It

“…Previous psycholinguistic research conducted with Quichua-Media Lengua bilinguals has demonstrated that speakers are able to reliably distinguish the two languages as well as putative mixtures (Lipski 2017a(Lipski , 2017b; also Deibel 2020), and in a variety of language identification and elicited repetition tasks, both pronouns and interrogatives behaved differently from open-class lexical items (Lipski 2017a(Lipski , 2019a; in particular, these items triggered more "repairs" to deliberately mixed utterances. Because no grammatical constraints of either Quichua or Media Lengua are violated by switching languages at any particular point (e.g., after pronouns or interrogatives), the mixed utterances employed in the previous studies are clearly parsable, as evidenced, for example, by the ease with which they were translated (Lipski 2017b(Lipski , 2019b. Therefore, something in the speech signal other than a grammatical violation is responsible for the degraded acceptability of switches after pronouns and interrogatives in both production and processing…”

“…Despite the wryly humorous name, Media Lengua is a full language spoken natively together with Quichua in the communities of Pijal, Angla, and Casco Valenzuela in the northern Ecuadoran province of Imbabura and consists of Quichua morphosyntax, complete with all system morphemes, but with virtually all Quichua roots replaced by their Spanish equivalents. Media Lengua was first described in the 1970s for some communities in central Ecuador by Muysken (1979Muysken ( , 1981Muysken ( , 1988Muysken ( , 1997; it has now disappeared from this region (Lipski 2019b;Müller 2011;Shappeck 2011), but is maintained robustly in the three aforementioned communities at least since the middle of the 20th century (Gómez Rendón 2005Lipski 2019b;Stewart 2011Stewart , 2013.…”