Sociolinguistic Implications of Language Contact Situation and the Development of Kashmiri-Arabic Common Lexicon

Abstract

Sharing lexicon is a direct outcome of a language contact situation. When two or more languages exist side-by-side while serving the communicative requirements in a particular social situation, they grow in an envelope and environment of linguistic exchange, and sharing of lexicon among them becomes a natural process. In a language contact situation, the speakers of one language are bound to incorporate linguistic items from their contact languages into their language to satisfy their communication needs. In the linguistically heterogeneous and multilingual situation of the Kashmiri Speech Community, Kashmiri, a member of the Indo-Aryan family, and Arabic, a language of the Semitic family of languages, are two significantly dominant contact languages. The side-by-side existence of these two languages while serving different sociolinguistic purposes and the assignment of different roles to them in various domains of the social life of the Kashmiri speech community have resulted in a linguistic amalgamation at a very large scale. This linguistic amalgamation has, in turn, resulted in the transfer of an enormously huge stock of lexicon from Arabic into Kashmiri, thereby paving a smooth path for the development of an extensively large amount of lexicon common to them. In the present paper, an attempt has been made to demonstrate various Kashmiri-Arabic language contact situations and the subsequent transfer of the Arabic lexicon into the Kashmiri language. The paper also considers the impetus and inspiration behind this Arabic-Kashmiri linguistic flow in detail. The influence of some sociolinguistic factors and linguistic implications of the Kashmiri-Arabic common lexicon has also been explored in the study. In the paper, an effort has been made to throw light on the hospitality of the Arabic language in donating an enormously huge amount of word treasure to Kashmiri and the receptivity of the Kashmiri language in accepting this vocabulary treasure from the Arabic language.