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104-713: Mauritian Creole is the lingua franca of the Republic of Mauritius, which gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1968. Both English and French are used as alternatives to Mauritian Creole. English is spoken primarily for administration and educational purposes and French is used by the media and as a second language. Mauritians tend to speak Mauritian Creole at home and French in the workplace. French and English are taught in schools. Though Mauritians are of numerous ethnic origins (including Indian, African, European, and Chinese) Mauritian Creole has gradually replaced

208-426: A bridge language , common language , trade language , auxiliary language , link language or language of wider communication ( LWC ), is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both of the speakers' native languages. Linguae francae have developed around

312-785: A vernacular language is the native language of a specific geographical community, a lingua franca is used beyond the boundaries of its original community, for trade, religious, political, or academic reasons. For example, English is a vernacular in the United Kingdom but it is used as a lingua franca in the Philippines , alongside Filipino . Likewise, Arabic , French , Standard Chinese , Russian and Spanish serve similar purposes as industrial and educational lingua francas across regional and national boundaries. Even though they are used as bridge languages, international auxiliary languages such as Esperanto have not had

416-525: A common language, and spread across the Arab and Muslim worlds. In Djibouti and parts of Eritrea , both of which are countries where multiple official languages are spoken, Arabic has emerged as a lingua franca in part thanks to the population of the region being predominantly Muslim and Arabic playing a crucial role in Islam. In addition, after having fled from Eritrea due to ongoing warfare and gone to some of

520-457: A creole language, with the complexity and completeness required for young children to use it as their mother tongue. Historical documents from as early as 1773 note the "creole language" that the slaves spoke. The British took over Mauritius during the Napoleonic era , but few native English speakers ever settled there. Mauritian Creole had already been firmly entrenched and continued to be

624-492: A focus on linguistic structure independent of phonetic realization or semantics. In 1968, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English (SPE), the basis for generative phonology . In that view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features . The features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant , and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from

728-522: A given language) and phonological alternation (how the pronunciation of a sound changes through the application of phonological rules , sometimes in a given order that can be feeding or bleeding , ) as well as prosody , the study of suprasegmentals and topics such as stress and intonation . The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality because they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones. The same principles have been applied to

832-531: A great degree of adoption, so they are not described as lingua francas. The term lingua franca derives from Mediterranean Lingua Franca (also known as Sabir ), the pidgin language that people around the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean Sea used as the main language of commerce and diplomacy from the late Middle Ages to the 18th century, most notably during the Renaissance era . During that period,

936-506: A language is necessarily an application of theoretical principles to analysis of phonetic evidence in some theories. The distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of the phoneme in the mid-20th century. Some subfields of modern phonology have a crossover with phonetics in descriptive disciplines such as psycholinguistics and speech perception , which result in specific areas like articulatory phonology or laboratory phonology . Definitions of

1040-855: A minority language in the Baltic states and some other states in Eastern Europe, as well as in pre- opening China. It remains the official language of the Commonwealth of Independent States . Russian is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union , its use has declined in post-Soviet states. Parts of the Russian speaking minorities outside Russia have emigrated to Russia or assimilated into their countries of residence by learning

1144-619: A more abstract level, as a component of morphemes ; these units can be called morphophonemes , and analysis using this approach is called morphophonology . In addition to the minimal units that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, or replace one another in different forms of the same morpheme ( allomorphs ), as well as, for example, syllable structure, stress , feature geometry , tone , and intonation . Phonology also includes topics such as phonotactics (the phonological constraints on what sounds can appear in what positions in

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1248-551: A native language. In medical practices and hospitals, nurses typically communicate with other professionals in English as a lingua franca. This occurrence has led to interest in researching the consequences of the medical community communicating in a lingua franca. English is also sometimes used in Switzerland between people who do not share one of Switzerland's four official languages , or with foreigners who are not fluent in

1352-435: A noun is singular or plural can usually be determined only by context. However, the particle bann (from bande ) is often placed before a plural. French un/une corresponds to Mauritian enn but its use has slightly different rules. Mauritian has an article ( la ), but it is placed after the noun. Compare French un rat , ce rat , le rat , les rats , and Mauritian enn lera , lera-la and bann lera . In Mauritian, there

1456-438: A phonological system equivalent to the system of sounds in spoken languages. The building blocks of signs are specifications for movement, location, and handshape. At first, a separate terminology was used for the study of sign phonology ("chereme" instead of "phoneme", etc.), but the concepts are now considered to apply universally to all human languages . The word "phonology" (as in " phonology of English ") can refer either to

1560-439: A pioneer in phonology, wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as Kitāb Al-Munṣif , Kitāb Al-Muḥtasab , and Kitāb Al-Khaṣāʾiṣ    [ ar ] . The study of phonology as it exists today is defined by the formative studies of the 19th-century Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay , who (together with his students Mikołaj Kruszewski and Lev Shcherba in

1664-664: A process of change the lingua franca and Portuguese lexicon was replaced with the languages of the people in contact. Portuguese remains an important lingua franca in the Portuguese-speaking African countries , East Timor , and to a certain extent in Macau where it is recognized as an official language alongside Chinese though in practice not commonly spoken. Portuguese and Spanish have a certain degree of mutual intelligibility and mixed languages such as Portuñol are used to facilitate communication in areas like

1768-682: A pronunciation of a word that best satisfies a list of constraints ordered by importance; a lower-ranked constraint can be violated when the violation is necessary in order to obey a higher-ranked constraint. The approach was soon extended to morphology by John McCarthy and Alan Prince and has become a dominant trend in phonology. The appeal to phonetic grounding of constraints and representational elements (e.g. features) in various approaches has been criticized by proponents of "substance-free phonology", especially by Mark Hale and Charles Reiss . An integrated approach to phonological theory that combines synchronic and diachronic accounts to sound patterns

1872-498: A simplified version of mainly Italian in the eastern Mediterranean and Spanish in the western Mediterranean that incorporated many loanwords from Greek , Slavic languages , Arabic , and Turkish came to be widely used as the "lingua franca" of the region, although some scholars claim that the Mediterranean Lingua Franca was just poorly used Italian. In Lingua Franca (the specific language), lingua

1976-700: A small portion of Mauritian vocabulary derives from the Portuguese element in European maritime jargon (e.g., the Mediterranean Lingua Franca ) or from enslaved Africans or Asians who came from areas in which Portuguese was used as a trade language (e.g., Angola and Mozambique ). Similarly, the Dutch had a colony on Mauritius from 1638 to 1710, but ultimately evacuated to Réunion. A few runaway slaves remained, leaving no discernible impact on

2080-569: A systematic study of the sounds in a language appears in the 4th century BCE Ashtadhyayi , a Sanskrit grammar composed by Pāṇini . In particular, the Shiva Sutras , an auxiliary text to the Ashtadhyayi , introduces what may be considered a list of the phonemes of Sanskrit, with a notational system for them that is used throughout the main text, which deals with matters of morphology , syntax and semantics . Ibn Jinni of Mosul ,

2184-409: A universally fixed set and have the binary values + or −. There are at least two levels of representation: underlying representation and surface phonetic representation. Ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation (the so-called surface form). An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of

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2288-591: A variant spoken in Riau specifically as the basis for " Indonesian " for national use despite Javanese having more native speakers; this standard is the sole official language spoken throughout the vast country despite being the first language of some Indonesians. Swahili developed as a lingua franca between several Bantu -speaking tribal groups on the east coast of Africa with heavy influence from Arabic. The earliest examples of writing in Swahili are from 1711. In

2392-607: A variety of fields and international organizations to communicate with one another. English is the most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the historical global influence of the British Empire and the United States . It is a co-official language of the United Nations and many other international and regional organizations and has also become the de facto language of diplomacy , science , international trade , tourism , aviation , entertainment and

2496-710: A widely studied language in Central Europe and the Balkans, especially in former Yugoslavia . It is recognized as an official language in countries outside of Europe, specifically Namibia . German is also one of the working languages of the EU along English and French, but it is used less in that role than the other two. Today, Standard Mandarin Chinese is the lingua franca of China and Taiwan , which are home to many mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese and, in

2600-1364: Is li té fine gagne for past, li té i gagne for past progressive, and li sava gagne for present progressive or near future . Here is the Lord's Prayer in Mauritian Creole, French and English: Fer rekonet ki to nom sain, Fer ki to regn vini, Fer to volonte akonpli, Lor later kouma dan lesiel. Donn nou azordi dipin ki nou bizin. Pardonn nou, nou bann ofans, Kouma nou ousi pardonn lezot ki finn ofans nou. Pa les nou tom dan tantasion Me tir nou depi lemal. Faire reconnaitte que to nom saint, Faire que to règne vini, Faire to volonté accompli L'haur la-terre coumma dans le-ciel. Donne-nous ajord'hui du-pain que nous bisein. Pardonne-nous nous banne offense, Coumma nous oussi pardonne les-auttes qui fine offense nous. Pas laisse nous tomme dans tentation, Mais tire-nous depuis le-mal. Que ton Nom soit sanctifié, Que ton règne vienne, Que ta volonté soit faite Sur la terre comme au ciel. Donne-nous aujourd'hui notre pain de ce jour. Pardonne-nous nos offenses, Comme nous pardonnons aussi à ceux qui nous ont offensés. Et ne nous soumets pas à la tentation, Mais délivre-nous du mal. hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth, as it

2704-721: Is Patricia Donegan, Stampe's wife; there are many natural phonologists in Europe and a few in the US, such as Geoffrey Nathan. The principles of natural phonology were extended to morphology by Wolfgang U. Dressler , who founded natural morphology. In 1976, John Goldsmith introduced autosegmental phonology . Phonological phenomena are no longer seen as operating on one linear sequence of segments, called phonemes or feature combinations but rather as involving some parallel sequences of features that reside on multiple tiers. Autosegmental phonology later evolved into feature geometry , which became

2808-525: Is among the most important works in the field from that period. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of morphophonology , but the concept had also been recognized by de Courtenay. Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of the archiphoneme . Another important figure in the Prague school was Roman Jakobson , one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century. Louis Hjelmslev 's glossematics also contributed with

2912-569: Is attested across a wide geography beyond South Asia. Inscriptions and literary evidence suggest that Sanskrit was already being adopted in Southeast Asia and Central Asia in the 1st millennium CE, through monks, religious pilgrims and merchants. Until the early 20th century, Literary Chinese served as both the written lingua franca and the diplomatic language in East Asia, including China, Korea , Japan , Ryūkyū , and Vietnam . In

3016-549: Is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He also worked on the theory of phonetic alternations (what is now called allophony and morphophonology ) and may have had an influence on the work of Saussure, according to E. F. K. Koerner . An influential school of phonology in the interwar period was the Prague school . One of its leading members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy , whose Grundzüge der Phonologie ( Principles of Phonology ), published posthumously in 1939,

3120-482: Is controversial, and which have sometimes been identified with each other. These are: Ajem-Turkic functioned as lingua franca in the Caucasus region and in southeastern Dagestan , and was widely spoken at the court and in the army of Safavid Iran . English is sometimes described as the foremost global lingua franca, being used as a working language by individuals of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds in

3224-516: Is currently one of the national languages and it is taught in schools and universities in several East African countries, thus prompting it to be regarded as a modern-day lingua franca by many people in the region. Several Pan-African writers and politicians have unsuccessfully called for Swahili to become the lingua franca of Africa as a means of unifying the African continent and overcoming the legacy of colonialism. Phonology Phonology

Mauritian Creole - Misplaced Pages Continue

3328-569: Is equally applicable to a non-creole language native to one nation (often a colonial power) learned as a second language and used for communication between diverse language communities in a colony or former colony. Lingua francas are often pre-existing languages with native speakers, but they can also be pidgins or creoles developed for that specific region or context. Pidgins are rapidly developed and simplified combinations of two or more established languages, while creoles are generally viewed as pidgins that have evolved into fully complex languages in

3432-522: Is from the Italian for 'a language'. Franca is related to Greek Φρᾰ́γκοι ( Phránkoi ) and Arabic إِفْرَنْجِي ( ʾifranjiyy ) as well as the equivalent Italian—in all three cases, the literal sense is ' Frankish ', leading to the direct translation: 'language of the Franks '. During the late Byzantine Empire , Franks was a term that applied to all Western Europeans. Through changes of

3536-617: Is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. . Papen, Robert A. The French-based Creoles of the Indian Ocean: An Analysis and Comparison. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of California, San Diego. 1978. Lingua franca A lingua franca ( / ˌ l ɪ ŋ ɡ w ə ˈ f r æ ŋ k ə / ; lit.   ' Frankish tongue ' ; for plurals see § Usage notes ), also known as

3640-622: Is increasing steadily, however, the orthographies used in them are significantly different. The Mauritian government began supporting an orthographic reform in 2011, with a system that generally follows French but eliminates silent letters and reduces the number of different ways in which the same sound can be written. It was codified in the Lortograf Kreol Morisien (2011) and used in the Gramer Kreol Morisien (2012) as well. The language became standard upon

3744-419: Is language-specific. Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups. Prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance. Phonological processes are unordered with respect to each other and apply simultaneously, but the output of one process may be the input to another. The second most prominent natural phonologist

3848-437: Is only one form for each plural pronoun and the third-person singular pronoun, regardless of case or gender ; li can thus be translated as "he, she, it, him, his, her, hers" depending on the context. Verbs do not change their form according to tense or person . Instead, the accompanying noun or pronoun determines who is engaging in the action, and several preverbal particles are used alone or in combination to indicate

3952-452: Is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages , their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety . At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but now it may relate to any linguistic analysis either: Sign languages have

4056-403: Is the only contrasting feature (two words can have different meanings but with the only difference in pronunciation being that one has an aspirated sound where the other has an unaspirated one). Part of the phonological study of a language therefore involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of native speakers ) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what

4160-526: Is the preferred and dominant language used for inter-communication between different ethnic groups of Pakistan. Malay is understood across a cultural region in Southeast Asia called the " Malay world " including Brunei , Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, southern Thailand , and certain parts of the Philippines. It is pluricentric , with several nations codifying a local vernacular variety into several national literary standards: Indonesia notably adopts

4264-519: Is the primary medium of education and serves as the lingua franca among citizens. Even in countries not associated with the English-speaking world , English has emerged as a lingua franca in certain situations where its use is perceived to be more efficient to communicate, especially among groups consisting of native speakers of many languages. In Qatar , the medical community is primarily made up of workers from countries without English as

Mauritian Creole - Misplaced Pages Continue

4368-552: Is true for some adjectives and prepositions : French femme ("woman") and riz ("rice") are bonnfam (from bonne femme ) and diri (from du riz ) in Mauritian. Some words have changed their meanings: Mauritian gagn ("to get, obtain") is derived from French gagner ("to win, earn"). Other words come from either Portuguese or Spanish . The word ziromon meaning pumpkin is from Portuguese jerimum , originally from Tupi jirumun . There are also several loanwords from

4472-421: Is typically distinguished from phonetics , which concerns the physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds or signs of language. Phonology describes the way they function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning. For many linguists, phonetics belongs to descriptive linguistics and phonology to theoretical linguistics , but establishing the phonological system of

4576-766: Is used as a lingua franca in Switzerland to some extent; however, English is generally preferred to avoid favoring it over the three other official languages. Middle Low German used to be the Lingua franca during the late Hohenstaufen till the mid-15th century periods, in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea when extensive trading was done by the Hanseatic League along the Baltic and North Seas. German remains

4680-793: The Carpathian Mountains , the Danube and the Black sea , corresponding to Wallachia and Moldavia . Nowadays, the Cyrillic writing system is used for various languages across Eurasia, and as the national script in various Slavic, Turkic , Mongolic , Uralic , Caucasian and Iranic -speaking countries in Southeastern Europe , Eastern Europe, the Caucasus , Central, North, and East Asia. The Mediterranean Lingua Franca

4784-596: The French Caribbean , French is the lingua franca in professional sectors and education, even though it is not the native language of the majority. French continues to be used as a lingua franca in certain cultural fields such as cuisine , fashion , and sport . As a consequence of Brexit , French has been increasingly used as a lingua franca in the European Union and its institutions either alongside or, at times, in place of English. German

4888-507: The Internet . When the United Kingdom became a colonial power, English served as the lingua franca of the colonies of the British Empire . In the post-colonial period, most of the newly independent nations which had many indigenous languages opted to continue using English as one of their official languages such as Ghana and South Africa . In other former colonies with several official languages such as Singapore and Fiji , English

4992-709: The Kazan School ) shaped the modern usage of the term phoneme in a series of lectures in 1876–1877. The word phoneme had been coined a few years earlier, in 1873, by the French linguist A. Dufriche-Desgenettes . In a paper read at 24 May meeting of the Société de Linguistique de Paris , Dufriche-Desgenettes proposed for phoneme to serve as a one-word equivalent for the German Sprachlaut . Baudouin de Courtenay's subsequent work, though often unacknowledged,

5096-648: The Mediterranean Basin from the 11th to the 19th centuries. A world language —a language spoken internationally and by many people—is a language that may function as a global lingua franca. Any language regularly used for communication between people who do not share a native language is a lingua franca. Lingua franca is a functional term, independent of any linguistic history or language structure. Pidgins are therefore lingua francas; creoles and arguably mixed languages may similarly be used for communication between language groups. But lingua franca

5200-570: The Silk Road , which is why native speakers of Sogdian were employed as translators in Tang China . The Sogdians also ended up circulating spiritual beliefs and texts, including those of Buddhism and Christianity , thanks to their ability to communicate to many people in the region through their native language. Old Church Slavonic , an Eastern South Slavic language, is the first Slavic literary language . Between 9th and 11th century, it

5304-774: The 12th century AD. Tamil was used for inscriptions from the 10th through 14th centuries in southern Karnataka districts such as Kolar , Mysore , Mandya and Bangalore . Latin , through the power of the Roman Republic , became the dominant language in Italy and subsequently throughout the realms of the Roman Empire. Even after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire , Latin was the common language of communication, science, and academia in Europe until well into

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5408-593: The 18th century, when other regional vernaculars (including its own descendants, the Romance languages) supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the modern linguistic definition. Classical Māori is the retrospective name for the language (formed out of many dialects, albeit all mutually intelligible) of both the North Island and the South Island for

5512-632: The 800 years before the European settlement of New Zealand . Māori shared a common language that was used for trade, inter- iwi dialogue on marae , and education through wānanga . After the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi , Māori language was the lingua franca of the Colony of New Zealand until English superseded it in the 1870s. The description of Māori language as New Zealand's 19th-century lingua franca has been widely accepted. The language

5616-462: The Mauritian language. The French ultimately claimed Mauritius and first settled it from 1715 to 1721, building a plantation economy based on slave labour. People from West and Southeast Africa Madagascar came to form 85% of the population by 1777, which led to linguistic fragmentation. The size of the native French settler population on the island remained small and the enslaved population lacked formal education. The common language that developed

5720-498: The Portuguese Empire, Africa, South America and Asia in the 15th and 16th centuries. When the Portuguese started exploring the seas of Africa, America, Asia and Oceania, they tried to communicate with the natives by mixing a Portuguese-influenced version of lingua franca with the local languages. When Dutch, English or French ships came to compete with the Portuguese, the crews tried to learn this "broken Portuguese". Through

5824-471: The ancestral languages of most of the population to become the primary home language of the country. Today, around 1.3 million people speak the language. Mauritian Creole is a French-based creole language that may be related to the Seychellois , Rodriguan , and Chagossian Creoles . Linguists disagree over the relationship, if any, of Mauritian Creole to other creole language examples in other parts of

5928-520: The border area between Brazil and Uruguay. The Hindustani language , with Hindi and Urdu as dual standard varieties, serves as the lingua franca of Pakistan and Northern India . Many Hindi-speaking North Indian states have adopted the three-language formula in which students are taught: "(a) Hindi (with Sanskrit as part of the composite course); (b) Any other modern Indian language including Urdu and (c) English or any other modern European language." The order in non-Hindi speaking states is: "(a)

6032-513: The breakup of much of the empire in the Americas, its function as a lingua franca was solidified by the governments of the newly independent nations of what is now Hispanic America . While its usage in Spain's Asia-Pacific colonies has largely died out except in the Philippines , where it is still spoken by a small minority, Spanish became the lingua franca of what is now Equatorial Guinea , being

6136-483: The case of Taiwan, indigenous Formosan languages . Among many Chinese diaspora communities, Cantonese is often used as the lingua franca instead, particularly in Southeast Asia, due to a longer history of immigration and trade networks with southern China, although Mandarin has also been adopted in some circles since the 2000s. Arabic was used as a lingua franca across the Islamic empires, whose sizes necessitated

6240-799: The course of adaptation by subsequent generations. Pre-existing lingua francas such as French are used to facilitate intercommunication in large-scale trade or political matters, while pidgins and creoles often arise out of colonial situations and a specific need for communication between colonists and indigenous peoples.  Pre-existing lingua francas are generally widespread, highly developed languages with many native speakers. Conversely, pidgins are very simplified means of communication, containing loose structuring, few grammatical rules, and possessing few or no native speakers. Creole languages are more developed than their ancestral pidgins, utilizing more complex structure, grammar, and vocabulary, as well as having substantial communities of native speakers. Whereas

6344-549: The early 19th century the use of Swahili as a lingua franca moved inland with the Arabic ivory and slave traders. It was eventually adopted by Europeans as well during periods of colonization in the area. German colonizers used it as the language of administration in German East Africa , later becoming Tanganyika , which influenced the choice to use it as a national language in what is now independent Tanzania . Swahili

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6448-784: The early 20th century, vernacular written Chinese replaced Classical Chinese within China as both the written and spoken lingua franca for speakers of different Chinese dialects, and because of the declining power and cultural influence of China in East Asia, English has since replaced Classical Chinese as the lingua franca in East Asia. Koine Greek was the lingua franca of the Hellenistic culture. Koine Greek (Modern Greek : Ελληνιστική Κοινή , romanized :  Ellinistikí Kiní , lit.   'Common Greek'; Greek: [elinistiˈci ciˈni] ), also known as Alexandrian dialect, common Attic, Hellenistic, or Biblical Greek,

6552-405: The extent to which they require allophones to be phonetically similar. There are also differing ideas as to whether this grouping of sounds is purely a tool for linguistic analysis, or reflects an actual process in the way the human brain processes a language. Since the early 1960s, theoretical linguists have moved away from the traditional concept of a phoneme, preferring to consider basic units at

6656-514: The field of phonology vary. Nikolai Trubetzkoy in Grundzüge der Phonologie (1939) defines phonology as "the study of sound pertaining to the system of language," as opposed to phonetics, which is "the study of sound pertaining to the act of speech" (the distinction between language and speech being basically Ferdinand de Saussure 's distinction between langue and parole ). More recently, Lass (1998) writes that phonology refers broadly to

6760-406: The field of study or to the phonological system of a given language. This is one of the fundamental systems that a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax , its morphology and its lexicon . The word phonology comes from Ancient Greek φωνή , phōnḗ , 'voice, sound', and the suffix -logy (which is from Greek λόγος , lógos , 'word, speech, subject of discussion'). Phonology

6864-420: The former being first-listed or only-listed in major dictionaries. The use of lingua francas has existed since antiquity. Akkadian remained the common language of a large part of Western Asia from several earlier empires, until it was supplanted in this role by Aramaic . Sanskrit historically served as a lingua franca throughout the majority of South Asia. The Sanskrit language's historic presence

6968-487: The language of communication between European academics, merchants, and diplomats. With the expansion of Western colonial empires, French became the main language of diplomacy and international relations up until World War II when it was replaced by English due the rise of the United States as the leading superpower . Stanley Meisler of the Los Angeles Times said that the fact that the Treaty of Versailles

7072-434: The language used after British occupation began. The abolition of slavery in the 1830s made many Africans leave the plantations. Indentured workers from India were brought to replace the freed slaves. The widely variable linguistic background of these immigrants mirrored that of the African slaves before them; therefore, no native language was dominant enough to become the basis for a shared language. Though Indians soon became

7176-1227: The languages of the African Malagasy slaves, who contributed such words as Mauritian lapang from Malagasy ampango (rice stuck to the bottom of a pot), Mauritian lafus from Malagasy hafotsa (a kind of tree), and Mauritian zahtak from Malagasy antaka (a kind of plant). In some cases, as with some of the nouns from French, the Mauritian word has fused with the French article le/la/les . Words of East African origin include Mauritian makutu from Makua makhwatta (running sore), Mauritian matak from Swahili , and Makonde matako (buttock). Recent loanwords tend to come from English, such as map instead of plan or carte in French ( plan or kart in Mauritian Creole). English words used in Mauritian Creole retain their English spelling but should normally be written with inverted commas . Only two common Mauritian Creole words derive from Chinese: min (from Yue Chinese : 麵 , romanized:  mihn ), meaning "noodle", and malang , meaning "dirty" or "poor". Nouns do not change in accordance with grammatical number . Whether

7280-454: The lingua franca for most of ancient Tamilakam and Sri Lanka . John Guy states that Tamil was also the lingua franca for early maritime traders from India. The language and its dialects were used widely in the state of Kerala as the major language of administration, literature and common usage until the 12th century AD. Tamil was also used widely in inscriptions found in the southern Andhra Pradesh districts of Chittoor and Nellore until

7384-486: The local language and using it preferably in daily communication. In Central European countries that were members of the Warsaw Pact , where Russian was only a political language used in international communication and where there was no Russian minority, the Russian language practically does not exist, and in schools it was replaced by English as the primary foreign language. Portuguese served as lingua franca in

7488-591: The local language. In the European Union , the use of English as a lingua franca has led researchers to investigate whether a Euro English dialect has emerged. In the fields of technology and science, English emerged as a lingua franca in the 20th century. The Spanish language spread mainly throughout the New World , becoming a lingua franca in the territories and colonies of the Spanish Empire , which also included parts of Africa, Asia, and Oceania. After

7592-537: The main language of government and education and is spoken by the vast majority of the population. Due to large numbers of immigrants from Latin America in the second half of the 20th century and resulting influence, Spanish has also emerged somewhat as a lingua franca in parts of the Southwestern United States and southern Florida , especially in communities where native Spanish speakers form

7696-433: The main royal courts of Europe, and among intellectuals. This lasted from the 14th century to the end of the 16th, when French replaced Italian as the usual lingua franca in northern Europe. Italian musical terms, in particular dynamic and tempo notations, have continued in use to the present day. Classical Quechua is either of two historical forms of Quechua , the exact relationship and degree of closeness between which

7800-697: The major language of the state or region; (b) Hindi; (c) Any other modern Indian language including Urdu but excluding (a) and (b) above; and (d) English or any other modern European language." Hindi has also emerged as a lingua franca in Arunachal Pradesh , a linguistically diverse state in Northeast India. It is estimated that nine-tenths of the state's population knows Hindi. Urdu is the lingua franca of Pakistan and had gained significant influence amongst its people, administration and education. While it shares official status with English, Urdu

7904-434: The majority of the population. At present it is the second most used language in international trade, and the third most used in politics, diplomacy and culture after English and French. It is also one of the most taught foreign languages throughout the world and is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations . French is sometimes regarded as the first global lingua franca, having supplanted Latin as

8008-541: The majority population on the island, their own linguistic fragmentation, as well as their alienation from the English- and French-speaking plantation owners, led them to take up Mauritian Creole as their lingua franca . The native English and French population have long enjoyed greater social status, in addition to dominating government , business , education , and the media ; however, Mauritian Creole's popularity in most informal domains has persisted, with around 85% of

8112-533: The many indigenous languages spoken in their territory. Notably, in most Francophone West and Central African countries, French has transitioned from being only a lingua franca to the native language among some communities, mostly in urban areas or among the elite class. In other regions such as the French-speaking countries of the Maghreb ( Algeria , Tunisia , Morocco , and Mauritania ) and parts of

8216-533: The nearby Arab countries, Eritrean emigrants are contributing to Arabic becoming a lingua franca in the region by coming back to their homelands having picked up the Arabic language. Russian is in use and widely understood in Central Asia and the Caucasus , areas formerly part of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Its use remains prevalent in many post-Soviet states . Russian has some presence as

8320-419: The particular language) was first recorded in English during the 1670s, although an even earlier example of the use of it in English is attested from 1632, where it is also referred to as "Bastard Spanish". The term is well established in its naturalization to English and so major dictionaries do not italicize it as a "foreign" term. Its plurals in English are lingua francas and linguae francae , with

8424-509: The population speaking this language. The phonology of Mauritian Creole is very similar to that of Standard French . However, French /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ have respectively depalatalised to /s/ and /z/ in Mauritian, and the front vowels /y/ and /ø/ have respectively been unrounded to /i/ and /e/ . The language has several published dictionaries , both monolingual and bilingual, written by authors such as Philip Baker (1987) and Arnaud Carpooran (2005, 2009, 2011). The number of publications

8528-480: The prestige language of politics, trade, education, diplomacy, and military in early modern Europe and later spreading around the world with the establishment of the French colonial empire . With France emerging as the leading political, economic, and cultural power of Europe in the 16th century, the language was adopted by royal courts throughout the continent, including the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Russia, and as

8632-565: The publication of the second edition of the Diksioner Morisien . Examples shown are in Mauritian Creole and French only. Examples shown are in English, Mauritian Creole and French. Most words come from French but are not always used in the same way. For example, the French article le, la, les is often fused with the noun in Mauritian: French rat is Mauritian lera and French temps is Mauritian letan . The same

8736-425: The same phoneme. First, interchanged allophones of the same phoneme can result in unrecognizable words. Second, actual speech, even at a word level, is highly co-articulated, so it is problematic to expect to be able to splice words into simple segments without affecting speech perception. Different linguists therefore take different approaches to the problem of assigning sounds to phonemes. For example, they differ in

8840-593: The same phonological category, that is of the phoneme /p/ . (Traditionally, it would be argued that if an aspirated [pʰ] were interchanged with the unaspirated [p] in spot , native speakers of English would still hear the same words; that is, the two sounds are perceived as "the same" /p/ .) In some other languages, however, these two sounds are perceived as different, and they are consequently assigned to different phonemes. For example, in Thai , Bengali , and Quechua , there are minimal pairs of words for which aspiration

8944-453: The same place and manner of articulation and differ in voicing only, were allophones of the same phoneme in English, but later came to belong to separate phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as described in historical linguistics . The findings and insights of speech perception and articulation research complicate the traditional and somewhat intuitive idea of interchangeable allophones being perceived as

9048-555: The same, but there is restricted variation that accounts for differences in surface realizations. Principles are held to be inviolable, but parameters may sometimes come into conflict. Prominent figures in this field include Jonathan Kaye , Jean Lowenstamm, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Monik Charette , and John Harris. In a course at the LSA summer institute in 1991, Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky developed optimality theory , an overall architecture for phonology according to which languages choose

9152-409: The shift in the meaning of Lingua Franca from a single proper noun to a common noun encompassing a large class of pidgin languages. As recently as the late 20th century, some restricted the use of the generic term to mean only mixed languages that are used as vehicular languages, its original meaning. Douglas Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary states that the term Lingua Franca (as the name of

9256-412: The sound inventory of the language is. The presence or absence of minimal pairs, as mentioned above, is a frequently used criterion for deciding whether two sounds should be assigned to the same phoneme. However, other considerations often need to be taken into account as well. The particular contrasts which are phonemic in a language can change over time. At one time, [f] and [v] , two sounds that have

9360-512: The standard theory of representation for theories of the organization of phonology as different as lexical phonology and optimality theory . Government phonology , which originated in the early 1980s as an attempt to unify theoretical notions of syntactic and phonological structures, is based on the notion that all languages necessarily follow a small set of principles and vary according to their selection of certain binary parameters . That is, all languages' phonological structures are essentially

9464-400: The subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language, and in more narrow terms, "phonology proper is concerned with the function, behavior and organization of sounds as linguistic items." According to Clark et al. (2007), it means the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language , or the field of linguistics studying that use. Early evidence for

9568-445: The syllable and the emphasis on segments. Furthermore, the generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and created problems. Natural phonology is a theory based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969 and, more explicitly, in 1979. In this view, phonology is based on a set of universal phonological processes that interact with one another; those that are active and those that are suppressed

9672-451: The tense: ti (from French étais ) marks past tense , pe , short for the now-rare ape (from "après", as Québec French ) still uses to mark the progressive aspect , (f)inn (from French fini ) marks the completive or perfect , and pou or sometimes va or av (from French va ) marks the future tense . For example, li finn gagn ("he/she/it had") can also be shortened to linn gagn and pronounced as one word. The Réunion version

9776-451: The term in literature, lingua franca has come to be interpreted as a general term for pidgins, creoles, and some or all forms of vehicular languages. This transition in meaning has been attributed to the idea that pidgin languages only became widely known from the 16th century on due to European colonization of continents such as The Americas, Africa, and Asia. During this time, the need for a term to address these pidgin languages arose, hence

9880-436: The world throughout human history, sometimes for commercial reasons (so-called "trade languages" facilitated trade), but also for cultural, religious, diplomatic and administrative convenience, and as a means of exchanging information between scientists and other scholars of different nationalities. The term is taken from the medieval Mediterranean Lingua Franca , a Romance -based pidgin language used especially by traders in

9984-437: The world. Robert Chaudenson and Henri Wittmann hypothesize that Mauritian Creole is closely related to Réunion Creole . However, Philip Baker and Chris Corne have argued that Réunionnais influence on Mauritian was minimal and that the two languages are no more similar to each other than they are to other French-based creoles. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to visit Mauritius, but they did not settle there. Only

10088-402: Was based on French, but a dialect that differed greatly from the language spoken by the slave owners. Mechanistically, this was similar to the process of creolization in other parts of the world. The pidgin language used for daily communication by people from varying linguistic backgrounds eventually became the native language of children born in these communities. Eventually, this evolved into

10192-556: Was initially vital for all European and Chinese migrants in New Zealand to learn, as Māori formed a majority of the population, owned nearly all the country's land and dominated the economy until the 1860s. Discriminatory laws such as the Native Schools Act 1867 contributed to the demise of Māori language as a lingua franca. Sogdian was used to facilitate trade between those who spoke different languages along

10296-526: Was initiated with Evolutionary Phonology in recent years. An important part of traditional, pre-generative schools of phonology is studying which sounds can be grouped into distinctive units within a language; these units are known as phonemes . For example, in English, the "p" sound in pot is aspirated (pronounced [pʰ] ) while that in spot is not aspirated (pronounced [p] ). However, English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as variations ( allophones , which cannot give origin to minimal pairs ) of

10400-473: Was largely based on Italian and Provençal . This language was spoken from the 11th to 19th centuries around the Mediterranean basin, particularly in the European commercial empires of Italian cities ( Genoa , Venice, Florence , Milan, Pisa , Siena ) and in trading ports located throughout the eastern Mediterranean rim. During the Renaissance , standard Italian was spoken as a language of culture in

10504-775: Was originally used at both schools, though the Cyrillic script was developed early on at the Preslav Literary School , where it superseded Glagolitic as the official script in Bulgaria in 893. Old Church Slavonic spread to other South-Eastern, Central, and Eastern European Slavic territories, most notably Croatia , Serbia , Bohemia , Lesser Poland , and principalities of the Kievan Rus' while retaining characteristically South Slavic linguistic features. It spread also to not completely Slavic territories between

10608-636: Was the common supra-regional form of Greek spoken and written during the Hellenistic period , the Roman Empire and the early Byzantine Empire . It evolved from the spread of Greek following the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, and served as the lingua franca of much of the Mediterranean region and the Middle East during the following centuries. Old Tamil was once

10712-501: Was the lingua franca of a great part of the predominantly Slavic states and populations in Southeast and Eastern Europe , in liturgy and church organization, culture, literature, education and diplomacy, as an Official language and National language in the case of Bulgaria . It was the first national and also international Slavic literary language (autonym словѣ́ньскъ ѩꙁꙑ́къ , slověnĭskŭ językŭ ). The Glagolitic alphabet

10816-401: Was written in English as well as French was the "first diplomatic blow" against the language. Nevertheless, it remains the second most used language in international affairs and is one of the six official languages of the United Nations . As a legacy of French and Belgian colonial rule, most former colonies of these countries maintain French as an official language or lingua franca due to

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