The Relationship Between Interlanguage and Substratum Research
Published in Minzu Yuwen in 1996, this theoretical linguistics article by Gai Xingzhi argues that second-language-acquisition "interlanguage" theory can illuminate how linguistic substrata form. The author reviews Western and Soviet definitions of substratum, then proposes that a substratum is best understood as elements of a replaced language absorbed into a replacing language through natural bilingual assimilation. Interlanguage -- the intermediate system learners produce while acquiring a second language -- is presented as a "living fossil" of substratum formation: the Naxi-accented Lijiang Chinese dialect is analyzed in detail (its lack of nasal finals, vowel mergers, and tonal variants) as a regionalized interlanguage produced by Naxi speakers learning Chinese. The article also uses the historical comparative method to show that pronoun and verb-morphology inflections in the Gansu Zuitou Chinese dialect derive from a Di-Qiang substratum, arguing that a substratum reveals ethnic history without proving genetic language affiliation.
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