Issues in multilingualism and its implications for communities and society at large, language acquisition and use, language diversification, and creative language use associated with new linguistic identities have become hot topics in both scientific and popular debates. A ubiquitous aspect of multilingualism is language contact. This book contains twelve articles that discuss specific aspects of Contact Linguistics. These articles cover a wide range of topics in the field, including creoles, areal linguistics, language mixing, and the sociolinguistic aspects of interactions with audiences. The book is dedicated to Pieter Muysken whose work on pidgin and creole languages, mixed languages, code-switching, bilingualism, and areal linguistics has been ground-breaking and inspirational for the authors in this book, as well as numerous other scholars working on the various facets of this rapidly expanding field.

This book stems from the joint effort of 25 research teams across Europe, representing a dozen disciplines from the social sciences and humanities, resulting in a radically novel perspective to the challenges of multilingualism in Europe. The various concepts and tools brought to bear on multilingualism are analytically combined in an integrative framework starting from a core insight: in its approach to multilingualism, Europe is pursuing two equally worthy, but non-converging goals, namely, the mobility of citizens across national boundaries (and hence across languages and cultures) and the preservation of Europe’s diversity, which presupposes that each locale nurtures its linguistic and cultural uniqueness, and has the means to include newcomers in its specific linguistic and cultural environment. In this book, scholars from applied linguistics, economics, the education sciences, finance, geography, history, law, political science, philosophy, psychology, sociology and translation studies apply their specific approaches to this common challenge. Without compromising the state-of-the-art analysis proposed in each chapter, particular attention is devoted to ensuring the cross-disciplinary accessibility of concepts and methods, making this book the most deeply interdisciplinary volume on language policy and planning published to date.

The appearance of Uriel Weinreich's Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems (1953) marked a milestone in the study of multilingualism and language contact. Yet until now, few linguists have been aware that its main themes were first laid out in Weinreich’s Columbia University doctoral dissertation of 1951, Research Problems in Bilingualism with Special Reference to Switzerland. Based on the author's fieldwork, it contains a detailed report on language contact in Switzerland in the first half of the 20th century, especially along the French-German linguistic border and between German and Romansh in the canton of Grisons (Graubünden). The present edition reproduces Weinreich's original text in full, with only minor alterations and corrections, as well as the author's fieldwork photographs and many of his hand-drawn diagrams. A new foreword reviews Weinreich's life and legacy, as well as developments in contact linguistics and the Swiss linguistic situation over the past 60 years. With selected comments on noteworthy points and references to more recent literature, this volume will be of interest not only to those working on the languages of Switzerland, or specialists in language contact, but all scholars today whose work builds on the broad and lasting foundations laid over half a century ago by Uriel Weinreich.

Understanding Language Contact offers an accessible and empirically grounded introduction to contact linguistics. Rather than taking a traditional focus on the outcomes of language contact, this book takes the novel approach of considering these outcomes as an endpoint of bilingualism and multilingualism. Covering speech production and comprehension, language diffusion across different interactional networks and timeframes, and the historical outcomes of contact-induced language change, this book: Discusses both how these areas relate to one another and how they correspond to different theoretical fields and methodologies; Draws together concepts and methodological/theoretical advances from the related fields of bilingualism and sociolinguistics to show how these can shed new light on the traditional field of contact linguistics; Presents up-to-date research in a digestible form; Includes examples from a wide range of contact languages, including Creoles and pidgins; Indigenous, minority, and heritage languages; mixed languages; and immigrants' linguistic practices, to illustrate ideas and concepts; Features exercises to test students’ understanding as well as suggestions for further reading to expand knowledge in specific areas. Written by three experienced teachers and researchers in this area, Understanding Language Contact is key reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students approaching bilingualism and language contact for the first time.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to the study of language contact and its outcomes, as well as the social and linguistic factors involved. Provides a comprehensive introduction to the field of contact linguistics. Examines a wide range of language contact phenomena from both general linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. Offers an account of current approaches to all of the major types of contact-induced change. Discusses the general processes and principles that are at work in cases of contact.

Presents fourteen contributions to the debate about what is possible in contact-induced language change. This volume also presents a number of vistas on language contact which represent developments in the field. It provides readers with insights on various levels of language-contact related studies.

Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2016 initiates a new series of collective volumes on formal Slavic linguistics. It presents a selection of high quality papers authored by young and senior linguists from around the world and contains both empirically oriented work, underpinned by up-to-date experimental methods, as well as more theoretically grounded contributions. The volume covers all major linguistic areas, including morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonology, and their mutual interfaces. The particular topics discussed include argument structure, word order, case, agreement, tense, aspect, clausal left periphery, or segmental phonology. The topical breadth and analytical depth of the contributions reflect the vitality of the field of formal Slavic linguistics and prove its relevance to the global linguistic endeavour. Early versions of the papers included in this volume were presented at the conference on Formal Description of Slavic Languages 12 or at the satellite Workshop on Formal and Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics, which were held on December 7-10, 2016 in Berlin.

It is generally agreed that about 7,000 languages are spoken across the world today and at least half may no longer be spoken by the end of this century. This state-of-the-art Handbook examines the reasons behind this dramatic loss of linguistic diversity, why it matters, and what can be done to document and support endangered languages. The volume is relevant not only to researchers in language endangerment, language shift and language death, but to anyone interested in the languages and cultures of the world. It is accessible both to specialists and non-specialists: researchers will find cutting-edge contributions from acknowledged experts in their fields, while students, activists and other interested readers will find a wealth of readable yet thorough and up-to-date information.

Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2017 is a collection of fifteen articles that were prepared on the basis of talks given at the conference Formal Description of Slavic Languages 12.5, which was held on December 7-9, 2017, at the University of Nova Gorica. The volume covers a wide array of topics, such as control verbs, instrumental arguments, and perduratives in Russian, comparatives, negation, n-words, negative polarity items, and complementizer ellipsis in Czech, impersonal se-constructions and complementizer doubling in Slovenian, prosody and the morphology of multi-purpose suffixes in Serbo-Croatian, and indefinite numerals and the binding properties of dative arguments in Polish. Importantly, by exploring these phenomena in individual Slavic languages, the collection of articles in this volume makes a significant contribution to both Slavic linguistics and to linguistics in general.

This volume is a collection of up-to-date articles on Maltese on all linguistic levels, demonstrating the variety of topics Maltese has to offer for linguists of all specializations. Two diachronic studies discuss the early contact of Maltese and Sicilian Arabic (Avram) and the possible lexical influence of Occitan-Catalan on Maltese in the 13th-15th century (Biosca & Castellanos). Fabri & Borg shed light on the rules that govern verb sequences in Maltese. Čéplö presents a corpus analysis of the syntactic and semantic properties of focus constructions in Maltese. Stolz & Ahrens analyze the behavior of prepositional phrases with identical heads under coordination. Wilmsen & Al-Sayyed study the use of muš as a negator in Maltese and beyond. Puech presents a detailed phonological analysis of Maltese and Tunisian Arabic based on prosody, syllabic structure, and stress. Azzopardi-Alexander gives a fine-grained analysis of phonological features in Maltese English, placing speakers on a Maltese-English continuum. Sciriha takes a visual approach to multilingualism in Malta with her quantitative study of public and private signs. Finally, Versteegh offers a thought-provoking perspective on the notion "mixed language" and its viability.