Rationale P3: What is the time frame when the largest number of people had the most opportunities for interaction in domain X?

Goal

This question and question P2 guide the respondent into thinking about the time frame of contact between the Focus Group and Neighbour Group. Ideally, in order to test for linguistic adaptation, one would want to know about the contact situation before present; it is the past that is likely to have provided the right sociohistorical context for changes in language structures to occur.

However, since it is difficult to generalise across the time-depth of contact scenarios worldwide, in this questionnaire we refrain from establishing any a priori chronological cut-off points for the contact situations we study. Instead, we aim to study the relevance of time bottom-up, that is, by asking respondents to (a) make an assessment of the duration of contact between Focus Group and Neighbour Group in a given social domain (P2), and (b) identify the time frame of densest contact between Focus Group and Neighbour Group in said social domain (this question). We then request the respondent to answer the rest of the questionnaire from the perspective of this time frame. In doing so, we hope to gain an understanding of the contact situations at stake that is maximally entrenched in the specifics of their linguistic and social ecologies.

Definitions

  • Densest contact: the greatest opportunity for interaction, for the greatest number of people.
  • The assessment of the duration and density of contact may or may not include the contemporary situation, depending, on whether, for instance, the contemporary situation may be extrapolated to the past, or on whether it is the only time setting the respondent can answer for.

Examples

Possible ways to delimit the time frame of densest contact:

  • Using the present to describe the past While there are dangers in drawing parallels from the present to the past (Bergs 2012; Trudgill 2020a for sociolinguistics; Hodder 1995 for archaeology), there is some evidence from across the globe that historical patterns of interaction may persevere despite major historical upheavals occurring. For example, Lindstedt (2016) writes of the Balkans that some local linguistic situations reflect the multilingualism of the past despite one hundred years passing since the Balkan Wars. Dickson (2015) shows the maintenance and transmission of cultural knowledge in certain domains are robust among traditional speakers of Marra in Northern Australia. The grandchildren of the oldest Marra speakers are now speaking Kriol, but the domains of interaction and knowledge transmission are still standing. A similar observation has been made about Maori in New Zealand (Chrisp 2005). Sookias et al. (2018) found that deep cultural ancestry can explain contemporary cultural phenomena (although more recent historical events are a better predictor of cultural similarity across groups).
  • Projecting to a known period of dense-most contact prior to significant disruptive changes in the language ecology of the two groupsWe use the label disruptive change to signify any major socio-political and/or natural event that fundamentally affected the linguistic ecology of the speech communities under study. Examples of socio-political upheavals are events related to modernisation such as industrialisation, colonisation, massive population movements related to wars and persecutions. Examples of natural disruptive events include volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods.

    Questions