Lexical Innovation And Variation In Hupa (Athabaskan)

Bibliographic Data

ID7807638
AuthorsJustin Spence (0000-0001-9549-6253, University of California, Davis, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume82
Issue1
Pages71-93
Publication date2016-01-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Journal of American Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-7071 • E-ISSN: 1545-7001
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/684424
OpenAlexW2276403575
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited15

A long-standing debate in the literature on endangered languages concerns the nature of linguistic variation among bilingual speakers in generations leading up to full-scale obsolescence: whether such variation is pathological and a result of factors such as imperfect learning and social fragmentation, or is instead a normal part of the sociolinguistic landscape even where shift is imminent. This paper considers this issue in light of data from Hupa, an Athabaskan (Dene) language of northwestern California. When colonial expansion in the mid-nineteenth century brought novel material culture items to the region, speakers of Hupa dealt with the linguistic problem of referring to them primarily by coining words using productive morphological resources. However, the documentary record is rife with variation in this regard, and many of these innovations appear not to have diffused widely throughout the Hupa-speaking community, at least not to the exclusion of other innovations. Both the avoidance of lexical borrowing and the existence of a high degree of variation are here interpreted as continuations of earlier Hupa linguistic practice, and hence as points of stability rather than discontinuity in the pre-contact and post-contact worlds

Archaeology · Coining (mint · Linguistics · Obsolescence · Sociology · Variation (astronomy · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

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