Multilingualism as linguistic chimerism. Conceptualizing language contact and English as a global contact language in a hybrid-oriented perspective

Abstract

In a globalized world where cultural boundaries have become increasingly blurred, multilingual practices have changed the understanding of language contact and contact-induced influence in global encounters. In the era of transnational communication, multilingual practices often involve the use of the global contact language of English as a Lingua Franca, resulting in a plethora of linguistic hybrids that undergo fast and continuous evolution. Contemporary multilingualism rather occurs in the form of linguistic chimeras, i.e., hybrid and fully functional lects where the boundaries of the merged linguistic systems that make them are hard to detect. Although theoretical frameworks of language contact, developed within contact linguistics, have tried to conceptualize contact phenomena, traditional models do not do justice to the fluidity and dynamism of current multilingual and English-mediated communicative practices, which might fit in a more hybrid-oriented perspective, as this contribution suggests.