The papers in this collection throw fresh light on the relation between language contact and contrastive linguistics. The book focuses equally on the mutual influence of linguistic systems in contact and on the language contrasts that govern the linguistic behaviour of the bilingual speaker.

This remains the fundamental base for studies of multilingual communities and language shift. Weinreich laid out the concepts, principles and issues that govern empirical work in this field, and it has not been replaced by any later general treatment. Prof. Dr. William Labov, University of Pennsylvania, Department of Linguistics"

This volume explores various hitherto under-researched relationships between languages and their discourse-cultural settings. The first two sections analyze the complex interplay between lexico-grammatical organization and communicative contexts. Part I focuses on structural options in syntax, deepening the analysis of information-packaging strategies. Part II turns to lexical studies, covering such matters as human perception and emotion, the psychological understanding of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’, the development of children’s emotional life and the relation between lexical choice and sexual orientation. The final chapters consider how new techniques of contrastive linguistics and pragmatics are contributing to the primary field of application for contrastive analysis, language teaching and learning. The book will be of special interest to scholars and students of linguistics, discourse analysis and cultural studies and to those entrusted with teaching European languages and cultures. The major languages covered are Akan, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish.

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.

The ability to speak two or more languages is a common human experience, whether for children born into bilingual families, young people enrolled in foreign language classes, or mature and older adults learning and using more than one language to meet life's needs and desires. This Handbook offers a developmentally oriented and socially contextualized survey of research into individual bilingualism, comprising the learning, use and, as the case may be, unlearning of two or more spoken and signed languages and language varieties. A wide range of topics is covered, from ideologies, policy, the law, and economics, to exposure and input, language education, measurement of bilingual abilities, attrition and forgetting, and giftedness in bilinguals. Also explored are cross- and intra-disciplinary connections with psychology, clinical linguistics, second language acquisition, education, cognitive science, neurolinguistics, contact linguistics, and sign language research.

This new volume on language contact and contact languages presents cutting-edge research by distinguished scholars in the field as well as by highly talented newcomers. It has two principal aims: to analyze language contact from different perspectives – notably those of language typology, diachronic linguistics, language acquisition and translation studies; and to describe, explain, and elaborate on universal constraints on language contact. The individual chapters offer systematic comparisons of a wealth of contact situations and the book as a whole makes a valuable contribution to deepening our understanding of contact-induced language change. With its broad approach, this work will be welcomed by scholars of many different persuasions.

Accurately differentiate between errors that are related to second-language influence or are due to a communication disorder. Is your student having difficulty because they have an impairment or because they are learning a second language? Improve instructional targets for culturally and linguistically diverse students in the general education classroom as well as make gains and improve referrals for special education. The framework used in this book makes it easy for any education professional to distinguish between language differences and language disorders regardless of your own language background.

Using different theoretical approaches and frameworks, this book addresses a broad range of themes in contrastive linguistics, including inflection, derivation and compounding, tense, wh-questions, post-verbal subjects, focus and clitics, among others. Comparing English, German, Greek, Romance, Slavic and South Pacific languages, the book highlights the significance of the contrastive perspective for language-specific description and general interface issues, casting light on contrasts between languages at the levels of morphology and syntax. In this respect, it makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of language typology and language universals.

This book contributes to a more balanced view of the most dramatic results of language contact by presenting linguistic and historical sketches of lesser-known contact languages. The twelve case studies offer eloquent testimony against the still common view that all contact languages are pidgins and creoles with maximally simple and essentially identical grammars. They show that some contact languages are neither pidgins nor creoles, and that even pidgins and creoles can display considerable structural diversity and structural complexity; they also show that two-language contact situations can give rise to pidgins, especially when access to a target language is withheld by its speakers. The chapters are arranged according to language type: three focus on pidgins (Hiri Motu, by Tom Dutton; Pidgin Delaware, by Ives Goddard; and Ndyuka-Trio Pidgin, by George L. Huttar and Frank J. Velantie), two on creoles (Kituba, by Salikoko S. Mufwene, and Sango, by Helma Pasch), one on a set of pidgins and creoles (Arabic-based contact languages, by Jonathan Owens), one on the question of early pidginization and/or creolization in Swahili (by Derek Nurse), and five on bilingual mixed languages (Michif, by Peter Bakker and Robert A. Papen; Media Lengua and Callahuaya, both by Pieter Muysken; and Mednyj Aleut and Ma'a, both by Sarah Thomason). The authors' collective goal is to help offset the traditional emphasis, within contact-language studies, on pidgins and creoles that arose as an immediate result of contact with Europeans, starting in the Age of Exploration. The accumulation of case studies on a wide diversity of languages is needed to create a body of knowledge substantial enough to support robust generalizations about the nature and development of all types of contact language.

John C. Maher explains why societies everywhere have become more multilingual, despite the disappearance of hundreds of the world languages. He considers our notion of language as national or cultural identities, and discusses why nations cluster and survive around particular languages even as some territories pursue autonomy or nationhood.