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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton July 27, 2005

Phoneme inventories, language contact, and grammatical complexity: A critique of Trudgill

  • Peter Bakker
From the journal Linguistic Typology

Abstract

There is no support for Trudgill's thesis. There are languages with exceptionally high numbers of consonants that are spoken by large groups, sometimes by millions as a second language. A pilot survey of contact languages (pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages) does not reveal unusual numbers of phonemes. Non-creole languages that have simplified their verbal infliection due to contact and second language learning appear not to decrease phoneme numbers either. Even most mixed languages that arose among fully bilingual groups fail to show exceptionally high numbers of consonants, even though some may display more complicated structures than their component languages. There is no correlation between language contact and phoneme inventories.

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Correspondence address: Institut for Lingvistik, Aarhus Universitet, Nobelparken, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 7, 8000 Århus C, Denmark; e-mail:

Published Online: 2005-07-27
Published in Print: 2004-10-20

© Walter de Gruyter

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