Global Eurolinguistics

Focus is on the world-wide phenomenon of linguistic migration to North America. Most treatments of linguistic transfer of European languages to the North American Continent have so far been written within a narrow national-philological framework for each language emigrated, although there are great similarities in the overall history of the migrating languages, both from a micro-linguistic and macro-linguistic point of view. Formal-linguistic phenomena such as for instance borrowing, mixing and code switching occur everywhere in a similar typology of interference and transference which is exemplified in every article of this book. Also the socioethnic development of most north-western European languages in North America demonstrate the same pattern: cultural convergence and loss of distinct ethnic markers in the course of time and change of generations under concomitant loss of the Old World languages. This lack of globality in dealing with the languages emigrated to North America is due to one-sided training in linguistics and is to be seen as an outcome of national upbringing not only in the national philologies but also the nationally-centred type of structural and generative linguistics.