A
substratum (plural:
substrata) or substrate is a language that an intrusive language influences, which may or may not ultimately change it to become a new language. The term is also used of substrate interference, i.e. the influence the substratum language exerts on the replacing language. According to some classifications, this is one of three main types of
linguistic interference: substratum interference differs from both
adstratum, which involves no language replacement but rather mutual borrowing between languages of equal "value", and
superstratum, which refers to the influence a socially dominating language has on another, receding language that might eventually be relegated to the status of a substratum language. In a typical case of substrate interference, a Language A occupies a given territory and another Language B arrives in the same territory, brought, for example, with migrations of population. Language B then begins to supplant language A: the speakers of Language A abandon their own language in favor of the other language, generally because they believe that it will help them achieve certain goals within government, the workplace, and in social settings. During the language shift, the receding language A still influences language B, for example, through the transfer of
loanwords,
place names, or grammatical patterns from A to B. In most cases, the ability to identify substrate influence in a language requires knowledge of the structure of the substrate language. This can be acquired in numerous ways: • The substrate language, or some later descendant of it, still survives in a part of its former range; • Written records of the substrate language may exist to various degrees; • The substrate language itself may be unknown entirely, but it may have surviving close relatives that can be used as a base of comparison. One of the first-identified cases of substrate influence is an example of a substrate language of the second type:
Gaulish, from the ancient Celtic people the Gauls. The
Gauls lived in the modern French-speaking territory before the arrival of the
Romans, namely the invasion of Julius Caesar's army. Given the cultural, economic and political advantages that came with being a Latin speaker, the Gauls eventually abandoned their language in favor of the language brought to them by the Romans, which evolved in this region, until eventually it took the form of the French language that is known today. The Gaulish speech disappeared in the late Roman era, but remnants of its vocabulary survive in some French words, approximately 200, as well as place-names of Gaulish origin. It is posited that some structural changes in French were shaped at least in part by Gaulish influence
calques such as
aveugle ("blind", literally without eyes, from Latin
ab oculis, which was a calque on the Gaulish word with the same semantic construction as modern French) with other Celtic calques possibly including "oui", the word for yes, while syntactic and morphological effects are also posited. Other examples of substrate languages are the influence of the now extinct
North Germanic Norn language on the
Scots dialects of the
Shetland and
Orkney islands. In the Arab
Middle East and
North Africa, colloquial
Arabic dialects, most especially
Levantine,
Egyptian, and
Maghreb dialects, often exhibit significant substrata from other regional Semitic (especially
Aramaic) and Berber languages.
Yemeni Arabic has
Modern South Arabian,
Old South Arabian and
Himyaritic substrata. Typically,
Creole languages have multiple substrata, with the actual influence of such languages being indeterminate.
Unattested substrata In the absence of all three lines of evidence mentioned above, linguistic substrata may be difficult to detect. Substantial indirect evidence is needed to infer the former existence of a substrate. The nonexistence of a substrate is
difficult to show, and to avoid digressing into speculation,
burden of proof must lie on the side of the scholar claiming the influence of a substrate. The principle of
uniformitarianism and results from the study of
human genetics suggest that many languages have formerly existed that have since then been replaced under expansive language families, such as Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic or Bantu. However, it is not a given that such expansive languages would have acquired substratum influence from the languages they have replaced. Several examples of this type of substratum have still been claimed. For example, the earliest form of the
Germanic languages may have
been influenced by a non-Indo-European language, purportedly the source of about one quarter of the most ancient Germanic vocabulary. There are similar arguments for a
Sanskrit substrate, a
Greek one, and a substrate underlying the
Sami languages. Relatively clear examples are the
Finno-Ugric languages of the
Chude and the "
Volga Finns" (
Merya,
Muromian, and
Meshcheran): while unattested, their existence has been noted in medieval chronicles, and one or more of them have left substantial influence in the
Northern Russian dialects. By contrast, more contentious cases are the
Vasconic substratum theory and
Old European hydronymy, which hypothesize large families of substrate languages across western Europe. Some smaller-scale unattested substrates that remain under debate involve alleged extinct branches of the Indo-European family, such as "
Nordwestblock" substrate in the Germanic languages, and a "Temematic" substrate in
Balto-Slavic, proposed by
Georg Holzer. Such words can in principle still be native inheritance, lost everywhere else in the language family, but they might in principle also originate from a substrate. The sound structure of words of unknown origin — their
phonology and
morphology — can often suggest hints in either direction. So can their meaning: words referring to the natural landscape, in particular indigenous fauna and flora, have often been found especially likely to derive from substrate languages. In the 1880s, dissent began to crystallize against this viewpoint. Within Romance language linguistics, the 1881
Lettere glottologiche of
Graziadio Isaia Ascoli argued that the early phonological development of
French and other
Gallo-Romance languages was shaped by the retention by Celts of their "oral dispositions" even after they had switched to Latin. In 1884,
Hugo Schuchardt's related but distinct concept of
creole languages was used to counter Mueller's view. In modern historical linguistics, debate persists on the details of how language contact may induce structural changes. The respective extremes of "all change is contact" and "there are no structural changes ever" have largely been abandoned in favor of a set of conventions on how to demonstrate contact induced structural changes. These include adequate knowledge of the two languages in question, a historical explanation, and evidence that the contact-induced phenomenon did not exist in the recipient language before contact, among other guidelines. ==Superstratum==