Graham Thurgood

Language Contact and the Directionality of Internal Drift: The Development of Tones and Registers in Chamic.

The Chamic languages of Vietnam have undergone phonological restructuring in the last two thousand years. In contact with the Mon-Khmer languages, all have developed final stress with consequent phonotactic restructuring. Since then, some languages have remained essentially unchanged (Roglai, Rade, and Jarai), but others have undergone radical restructuring: in contact with register languages, Western Cham has become a register language; in contact with the phonology of Bahnar, Haroi has become a restructured register language; in contact with the tonal Vietnamese, Phan Rang Cham has become incipiently tonal; and, in contact with the fully tonal languages of Hainan, Tsat has become fully tonal. The internal paths of change are relatively clear, because of their shallow time depth combined with the richness of the comparative data. However, despite the existence of phonetically plausible internal paths of development, the available evidence makes it clear that external contact set the changes in motion and determined their direction.*

Tai-Kadai and Austronesian: the nature of the historical relationship

Les resultats apportes par des recherches recentes sur la reconstruction des langues tai-kadai ont montre le lien entre ces langues et les langues austronesiennes. Des contacts eurent lieu dans le sud-ouest de la Chine qui furent le depart du mouvement austronesien dans les langues tai-kadai

Hainan Cham, Anong, and Eastern Cham: Three Languages, Three Social Contexts, Three Patterns of Change

Three separate languages are examined, each with a different sociolinguistic setting, and with each setting leading to a different pattern of grammatical change. The paper sketches the grammar changes and documents the associated social settings: specifically, how the language in question is used and whether outsiders are speaking the language. The paper supports the eneral conclusion (e.g., by Thomason & Kaufman) that the most important factors in contactinduced change are social ones but more interestingly and more specifically, in regard to these three languages, it deals which sociolinguistic contexts for language correlate with the three quite distinct sets of outcomes.

A grammatical sketch of Hainan Cham : history, contact, and phonology

From 1963 to 2011 Pacific Linguistics, located at the Australian National University, published over six hundred books concerned with the languages of the Pacific, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Southeast, South and East Asia. The Mouton Pacific Linguistics series represents a continuation of this publishing venture under the same Editorial Board. The Pacific Linguistics series presents linguistic descriptions, dictionaries, and other materials concerned with languages of this region. The authors and editors of Pacific Linguistics publications are drawn from a wide range of institutions around the world, and its publications are refereed by international scholars with relevant expertise. Pacific Linguistics has built a reputation as the most authoritative publisher of works on the languages of the Pacific and neighbouring areas, read by scholars with an interest in the region as well as by linguists with interests in language typology, sociolinguistics, language contact and the reconstruction of linguistic change and culture history. Pacific Linguistics is proud to act as a vehicle for the dissemination of knowledge about the languages of the Pacific and the Pacific Rim, many of which are little known, and to bring them to the attention of scholars around the world, as well as providing local communities with published language material, at a time when many minority languages are under threat.

The Historical Development of the Akha Evidentials System

Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1981), pp. 295-302