A typology of the prestige language
Henry Kahane
The recurrent features of a 'prestige language' are broadly reviewed. prevailing socio-political constellation provides motivations for its rise, the ways acquiring it, domains it transmits, and causes decline. process nativization can be analysed synchronically in terms creolization, diachronically stratigraphy. linking native language to dominant culture results either substratum or superstratum influences. Nativization may overt-as lexemic, morphosyntactic phonological borrowing-or covert, expressing itself style, calques, metaphors. lasting impact prestige consists standardization, creation sprachbund, relatively stable bilingualism.* English is great laboratory today's sociolinguist. We aware role our time, 'the other tongue' on global scale. A blooming industry, acronymed TESL ESL TESOL, has sprung up dry soil grammar. But event not new. Like everything else times, larger size, but principle situation no different from earlier case histories; as experience with enlivens
Language