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Fossilized inter-language

posted 6 Feb 2014, 01:48 by Jim Sheng
When Larry Selinker first proposed the interlanguage hypothesis in 1972 it was in the context of adult second language acquisition. Likewise, the phenomenon of fossilization was first introduced and discussed in that same paper solely in relation to adult second language learners. The model presented there is a failure driven model, where a vast majority of adult second language learners are characterized as being permanently stuck at an intermediary stage in their grammars, which does not match native speaker norms of the target grammar. It was only later (Selinker et al., 1975) that the inter-language hypothesis was extended from adult second language settings to the child second language grammars are also potentially fossilizable. Child interlanguages could potentially develop as dialects in their own right.

Pan Wuyun proposes that Hai Kou dialect is a fossilized inter-language resulted from the residents of Lin Gao learning Han Chinese language.