UMBERTO ANSALDO is Associate Professor in Linguistics at The University of Hong Kong. He was formerly a Senior Researcher with the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication and a Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. He has also worked in Sweden and Singapore and conducted fieldwork in China, the Cocos and Christmas Islands, and Sri Lanka. He is the co-editor of the Creole Language Library Series and has co-edited various journals and books including Deconstructing Creole (2007, John Benjamins). He is the author of Contact Languages: Ecology and Evolution in Asia (2009, Cambridge University Press).

CLAIRE BOWERN is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Yale University. Since graduating with a PhD from Harvard in 2004, she has focused research in two areas: language documentation and description in Indigenous Australia, and historical linguistics and prehistory. Her most recent publications include Morphology and Language History (edited with Bethwyn Evans and Luisa Miceli, 2008, John Benjamins) and Linguistic Fieldwork: A Practical Guide (2008, Palgrave Macmillan).

DAVID BRITAIN is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bern in Switzerland. He came to Essex in 1993 after having spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. His research interests are in dialect contact and mobility, geolinguistics, and the non-standard Englishes of southern England and the Southern Hemisphere. He is editor of Language in the British Isles (2007, Cambridge University Press), co-editor, with Jenny Cheshire, of Social Dialectology (2003, John Benjamins), and co-author, with Andrew Radford, Martin Atkinson, Harald Clahsen, and Andrew Spencer, of Linguistics: An Introduction (2009, second edition, Cambridge University Press).

G. TUCKER CHILDS received his PhD from the University of California (Berkeley), and has taught at and been associated with research institutions and universities in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Africa. He is now Professor of Applied Linguistics at Portland State University (Oregon, USA). His research interests are located primarily in Africa and include phonology and morphology, typology, variation and change, contact linguistics, and sociolinguistics. Current research focuses on documenting the moribund languages of the South Atlantic in Guinea and Sierra Leone. Two publications from his last project are A Grammar of Mani (Mouton de Gruyter) and a Mani primer.

KAREN P. CORRIGAN is currently Professor of Linguistics and English Language at Newcastle University, UK. Her main research interests are sociolinguistic variation, language contact (from a formal syntactic perspective), language shift and change. She has recently published Syntax and Variation (with Leonie Cornips, 2005, John Benjamins) and Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, vols. 1 and 2 (with Joan Beal and Hermann Moisl, 2007, Palgrave-Macmillan).

JOSEPH F. ESKA received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1988. He is now Professor of Linguistics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His primary research focus is on language change, especially with regard to the Celtic languages, and methodology in diachronic linguistics. Some of his recent significant publications are “Recent work in computational linguistic phylogeny,” Language 80 (with Don Ringe, 2004), “Observations on verbal art in ancient Vergiate,” Historische Sprachforschung 118, (with Angelo O. Mercado, 2005), and “Bergin’s Rule: Syntactic diachrony and discourse strategy,” Diachronica 24 (2007).

MARKKU FILPPULA is Professor of English Language at the University of Joensuu, Finland. Markku Filppula is known for his original research into questions of language contact (in the context of Irish and Scottish English) and into the role of dialect input in varieties of English. His recent publications include The Grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian Style (1999, Routledge), The Celtic Roots of English (edited with Juhani Klemola and Heli Pitkänen, 2002, University of Joensuu), and English and Celtic in Contact (with Juhani Klemola and Heli Paulasto, 2008, Routledge).

WILLIAM A. FOLEY is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. His main research interests are in the languages and cultures of island Southeast Asia and the Pacific, particularly the New Guinea region. He has undertaken in situ fieldwork in this region for some three decades now and has written extensively on its languages. He is particularly interested in the usefulness of modern grammatical theories in the description of these languages, as attested in publications like The Papuan Languages of New Guinea (1986, Cambridge University Press) and The Yimas Language of New Guinea (1991, Stanford University Press). His other main area of interest, again one forged ultimately out of interest in fieldwork, is anthropological linguistics, reflected in Anthropological Linguistics: An Introduction (1997, Blackwell).

CARMEN FOUGHT is a Professor of Linguistics at Pitzer College, in Claremont, California. She is the author of Chicano English in Context (2002, Palgrave Macmillan) and Language and Ethnicity (2006, Cambridge University Press). Her research focuses on issues of language and ethnic identity, the dialects of California, and bilingual acquisition. She is currently studying the representation of language in the media, including films, television, and commercials.

PENELOPE GARDNER-CHLOROS is Lecturer at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture, Birkbeck College, London. Her main research is into code-switching from a grammatical, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic perspective. She has pursued this line of research for many years by examining French and Alsatian along with English and Greek code-switching. Her most recent publication is the monograph Code-Switching (2009, Cambridge University Press).

LENORE A. GRENOBLE (PhD 1986, University of California, Berkeley) holds a joint appointment in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include Slavic, Tungusic and other languages of the North, discourse and conversation analysis, deixis, contact linguistics and language endangerment, attrition, and revitalization. Her fieldwork focuses on languages of Siberia and she is currently engaged in research on the interrelations between language shift, cultural change, and the environment in the North. Her recent publications include Saving Languages, co-authored with Lindsay J. Whaley (2006, Cambridge University Press); Endangered Languages: Current Issues and Future Prospects, co-edited with Lindsay J. Whaley (1998, Cambridge University Press); Language Policy in the Former Soviet Union (2003, Kluwer); Evenki, co-authored with Nadezhda Ja. Bulatova (1999); and Deixis and Information Packaging in Russian Discourse (1998, John Benjamins).

BERND HEINE is Emeritus Professor at the Institute of African Studies, University of Cologne, presently visiting professor at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. His 33 books include Auxiliaries: Cognitive Forces and Grammaticalization (1993, Oxford University Press), Possession Cognitive Sources, Forces, and Grammaticalization (1997, Cambridge University Press), Cognitive Foundations of Grammar (1997, Oxford University Press), African Languages: An Introduction (with Derek Nurse, 2000, Cambridge University Press), A Linguistic Geography of Africa (2008, Cambridge University Press). The following were co-authored with Tania Kuteva: World Lexicon of Grammaticalization (2002, Cambridge University Press), Language Contact and Grammatical Change (2005, Cambridge University Press), The Changing Languages of Europe (2006, Oxford University Press), The Genesis of Grammar (2008, Oxford University Press).

RAYMOND HICKEY is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Duisburg and Essen, Germany. His main research interests are the history and varieties of English (especially Irish English), Dublin English, and general questions of language contact, shift and change. Among his recent book publications are A Source Book for Irish English (2002, John Benjamins), Motives for Language Change (ed., 2003, Cambridge University Press), A Sound Atlas of Irish English (2004, Mouton de Gruyter), Legacies of Colonial English (ed., 2004, Cambridge University Press), Dublin English: Evolution and Change (2005, John Benjamins), Irish English: History and Present-Day Forms (2007, Cambridge University Press), and Eighteenth-Century English: Ideology and Change (ed., 2010, Cambridge University Press).

JOHN HOLM has a doctoral degree in linguistics from the University of London (1978). He taught at the College of the Bahamas and the City University of New York and has held the chair of English linguistics at the University of Coimbra in Portugal since 1998. His research focuses on the origins of creole structures and social factors affecting the gradient nature of creolization. He is the author of Pidgins and Creoles (1988–9, two vols.) and recently co-edited Contact Languages: Critical Concepts in Linguistics (2008, five vols.) with Susanne Michaelis. He is a founding member of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics and of the Associação: Crioulos de Base Lexical Portuguesa e Espanhola.

LARS JOHANSON is Professor of Turcology at the Oriental Institute of the University of Mainz, Germany. He has published extensively on synchronic and diachronic linguistics, especially in the domains of aspect-mood-tense, language contact, and language typology. Most of his publications focus on the Turkic language family. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Turkic Languages and the book series Turcologica.

BRIAN D. JOSEPH is Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and The Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of South Slavic Linguistics at The Ohio State University, where he has taught since 1979. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1978, writing his dissertation on syntactic change between Medieval and Modern Greek. Brian Joseph specializes in historical linguistics, Greek linguistics, and Balkan linguistics, and has published extensively in these areas, including the monograph The Synchrony and Diachrony of the Balkan Infinitive: A Study in Areal, General, and Historical Linguistics (1983, Cambridge University Press). He served as editor of Diachronica from 1999 to 2001 and as editor of Language from 2002 to 2008.

PAUL KERSWILL is a social dialectologist, with a special interest in dialect contact. He is now at the University of York (England). His first major study was on rural migrants in the Norwegian city of Bergen, but he is perhaps best known for his work (with Ann Williams and Jenny Cheshire) on the new dialect of Milton Keynes in England, followed by studies on the development of a Multicultural London English. He worked at the universities of Durham, Cambridge, and Reading before being appointed Professor of Sociolinguistics at Lancaster in 2004. His books are Dialects Converging: Rural Speech in Urban Norway (1994, Oxford University Press) and Dialect Change: Convergence and Divergence in European Languages (co-edited with Peter Auer and Frans Hinskens, 2005, Cambridge University Press).

TANIA KUTEVA is full Professor of English Linguistics at the Heinrich-Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany. Her major publications are in the field of grammaticalization, grammatical typology and language contact. She is the author of Auxiliation: An Enquiry into the Nature of Grammaticalization (2001, Oxford University Press). The following were co-authored with Bernd Heine: World Lexicon of Grammaticalization (2002, Cambridge University Press), Language Contact and Grammatical Change (2005, Cambridge University Press), The Changing Languages of Europe (2006, Oxford University Press), and The Genesis of Grammar (2008, Oxford University Press).

JOHANNA LAAKSO graduated and gained her PhD at the University of Helsinki, Finland, where she also led a research project on the Finnic languages in the 1990s. Since 2000, she has been Professor of Finno-Ugric studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research interests include historical and contact linguistics, gender linguistics, and multilingualism. She has published three monographs (most recently, Our Otherness: Finno-Ugrian Approaches to Women’s Studies, or Vice Versa 2005, LIT Verlag Münster) along with several edited volumes and various articles in altogether six languages.

JOHN M. LIPSKI is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on regional and social variation in Spanish, particularly in contact situations, as well as the contributions of the African diaspora to the diversification of Spanish. He is the author of more than 200 articles, and the following books: Afro-Bolivian Spanish (in press, Iberoamericana), Varieties of Spanish in the United States (in press, Georgetown University Press), A History of Afro-Hispanic Language (2005, Cambridge University Press), Latin American Spanish (1994, Longmans, also translated into Spanish and Japanese), The Speech of the Negros Congos of Panama (1989, John Benjamins), The Language of the Isleños of Louisiana (1990, Louisiana State University Press), Fonética y fonología del español de Honduras (1987, Editorial Guaymuras), The Spanish of Equatorial Guinea (1985, Max Niemeyer), Linguistic Aspects of Spanish-English Language Switching (1985, Latin American Studies Center), El español de Malabo (1990, Centro Cultural Hispano-Guineano), and (with the late Eduardo Neale-Silva), El español en síntesis (1981, Holt, Rinehart & Winston).

YARON MATRAS is Professor of Linguistics at School of Languages, Linguistics, and Cultures, University of Manchester, and author of numerous studies in contact linguistics, historical linguistics and dialectology, and linguistic typology, among them Romani: A Linguistic Introduction (2002, Cambridge University Press), Markedness and Language Change: The Romani Sample (with Viktor Elšík, 2006, Mouton de Gruyter), and Language Contact (2009, Cambridge University Press).

STEPHEN MATTHEWS is Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong, specializing in language typology, contact, and bilingualism. His books include Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar (1994, Routledge) and The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact (2007, Cambridge University Press), both co-authored with Virginia Yip.

PATRICK McCONVELL received his PhD for a thesis on Hausa syntax and semantics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London in 1973. He moved to Australia where he has engaged in linguistic and anthropological research with indigenous groups, mainly in the Northern Territory and the north of Western Australia. He has taught linguistics and anthropology at Northern Territory University (now Charles Darwin University) and Griffith University, and from 2000 to 2008 was Research Fellow in Language and Society, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra. He is now a researcher at the Australian National University, working on Australian indigenous kinship and hunter-gatherer language change.

APRIL McMAHON is now Vice-Chancellor of the University of Aberystwyth in Wales. Her main research interests are in historical linguistics, phonological theory, accents of English, and interdisciplinary approaches to language families and linguistic similarity. Her books include Understanding Language Change (1994, Cambridge University Press), Lexical Phonology and the History of English (2000, Cambridge University Press), Language Classification by Numbers (with Rob McMahon, 2005, Oxford University Press), and The Handbook of English Linguistics (co-edited with Bas Aarts, 2006, Blackwell).

RAJEND MESTHRIE is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English at the University of Cape Town, where he holds a National Research Foundation chair. He is currently President of the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa. Amongst his publications are the Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics (ed., 2001, Pergamon), and English in Language Shift: The History, Structure and Sociolinguistics of South African Indian English (1992, Cambridge University Press), Language in South Africa (ed., 2002, Cambridge University Press), and World Englishes (with Rakesh Bhatt, 2008, Cambridge University Press).

MARIANNE MITHUN is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work ranges over morphology, syntax, discourse, prosody, and their interactions; language change, particularly the development of grammatical structure, and language contact. She works with speakers of a number of languages indigenous to North America on documentation, education, and revitalization projects. She is the author of the comprehensive overview The Languages of Native North America. (1999, Cambridge University Press).

PIETER MUYSKEN is Professor of Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen. His research is focused on language contact both in the Netherlands and in the Caribbean and South America. Recent books include Bilingual Speech: A Typology of Code-Mixing (2000, Cambridge University Press), with William Adelaar The Languages of the Andes (2004, Cambridge University Press), and Functional Categories (2008, Cambridge University Press).

JOHANNA NICHOLS is Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Affiliate Professor in the Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley. She works on typology, historical linguistics, and Slavic languages as well as on Ingush and Chechen of the East Caucasian family. Together with Balthasar Bickel she co-founded and co-directs the Autotyp typological project (www.uni-leipzig.de/∼autotyp). Her publications include Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time (1992, University of Chicago Press), dictionaries of Ingush and Chechen (2004, Routledge/Curzon), and a grammar of Ingush (forthcoming, University of California Publications in Linguistics).

MICHAEL NOONAN received a PhD in linguistics from the University of California at Los Angeles and was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He published widely on general typology, contact linguistics, the grammar of subordination, grammaticalization, languages of the Bodic division of Tibeto-Burman, the Western Nilotic language Lango, and Irish. In addition, he was editor of the journal Studies in Language with Bernard Comrie and of two book series for John Benjamins: the Typological Studies in Language series and the Studies in Language Companion Series, the latter with Werner Abraham.

BRIGITTE PAKENDORF is a molecular anthropologist and linguist working on linguistic and genetic effects of prehistoric population contact. She currently leads the interdisciplinary Max Planck Research Group on Comparative Population Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Her own research has focused on the genetic prehistory and linguistic contact situation of the Turkic-speaking Sakha (Yakuts) and Tungusic-speaking Ä-vens of northeastern Siberia. Her publications include molecular anthropological studies of Siberian populations as well as papers on aspects of Sakha grammar, a monograph investigating the contact-induced changes undergone by Sakha, as well as papers on language contact in other Siberian groups.

THOMAS PURNELL (PhD, University of Delaware) is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His teaching focus is on phonetics, phonology, field methods, language variation, and language change. His main research interest is on variation within sound systems, particularly in ethnically affiliated Upper Midwestern US English. His research has appeared in Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Journal of English Linguistics, and American Speech.

PAUL ROBERGE is Professor of Germanic Languages and joint Professor of Linguistics at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also holds the title of Professor Extraordinary of General Linguistics at the University of Stellenbosch. His teaching and research interests are historical Germanic linguistics, sociohistorical linguistics, pidgin and creole languages, and Afrikaans. He has also written on the origin and evolution of human language. His most recent publication is “The creation of pidgins as a possible window on language evolution” in Language Evolution: The View from Restricted Linguistic Systems (edited by Rudolf P. Botha and Henritte de Swart, 2008, LOT Occasional Series, 8, Utrecht).

SUZANNE ROMAINE is Merton Professor of English Language, University of Oxford. She has a wide range of linguistic interests and qualifications which are amply attested in the many monograph publications on different spheres which she has produced over nearly three decades. Among her many books are the following: Socio-Historical Linguistics: Its Status and Methodology (1982, Cambridge University Press), Pidgin and Creole Languages (1988, Longman), Bilingualism (1995 [1989], Blackwell), Language in Australia (1991, Cambridge University Press), Language in Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (2000 [1994], Oxford University Press), Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (with Daniel Nettle, 2000, Oxford University Press), Tok Pisin Texts: From the Beginning to the Present (edited with Peter Mühlhäusler and Thomas E. Dutton, 2003, John Benjamins).

JOSEPH SALMONS holds a BA in Philosophy (University of North Carolina–Charlotte, 1978) and a PhD in Germanic Linguistics (University of Texas, 1984). He is Professor of German and Director of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research and teaching focus on speech sounds and language change, drawing data particularly from Germanic languages, including current Wisconsin English. He is co-author of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Germanic Languages, co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Historical Phonology, and executive editor of Diachronica: International Journal for Historical Linguistics.

HAROLD F. SCHIFFMAN is Professor Emeritus of Dravidian Linguistics and Culture, University of Pennsylvania. His research interests focus on the linguistics of the Dravidian languages, especially Tamil and Kannada, and on language policy. He has published in these two areas where overlapping interests in sociolinguistics (diglossia, language standardization, grammaticalization, and multilingualism) intersect with language policy and the politics of language. He is also director of the Consortium for Language Policy and Planning. Recent publications include Linguistic Culture and Language Policy (1996, Routledge) and A Reference Grammar of Spoken Tamil (1999, Cambridge University Press).

EDGAR W. SCHNEIDER is full Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Regensburg, Germany, after previous appointments in Bamberg, Georgia, and Berlin. He has written and edited several books (including American Earlier Black English, 1989, University of Alabama Press; Introduction to Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Survey Data, with William Kretzschmar, 1996, Sage; Focus on the USA, 1996, John Benjamins; Englishes Around the World, 1997, John Benjamins; Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages, with Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh, 2000, John Benjamins; Handbook of Varieties of English, co-edited with Bernd Kortmann, 2004, Mouton de Gruyter; Postcolonial English, 2007, Cambridge University Press) and published and lectured widely on the dialectology, sociolinguistics, history, semantics and varieties of English, and edits the scholarly journal English World-Wide along with an associated book series.

JEFF SIEGEL is Adjunct Professor in Linguistics at the University of New England in Australia. His main research is on the origins of contact languages (such as pidgins, creoles and koines), and the current use of these languages, especially in formal education. He has worked on Melanesian Pidgin, Hawai‘i Creole, Fiji Hindi, Pidgin Fijian, and Pidgin Hindustani. His publications include Pidgin Grammar: An Introduction to the Creole Language of Hawai‘i (with Kent Sakoda, 2003, Bess Press) and The Emergence of Pidgin and Creole Languages (2008, Oxford University Press).

SARAH THOMASON received her PhD from Yale in 1968 and taught there and at the University of Pittsburgh before moving to the University of Michigan in 1999. Her current research focuses on contact-induced language change and Salishan linguistics. Apart from the monograph Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (with Terrence Kaufman, 1988, University of California Press,) and Language Contact: An Introduction (2001, Edinburgh University Press) she has published many articles recently, including “Pronoun borrowing” (with Daniel Everett, 2005, Berkeley Linguistics Society 27).

PETER TRUDGILL has carried out research on dialects of English, Norwegian, Greek, Albanian, and Spanish and has published more than 30 books on sociolinguistics and dialectology. He was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Reading, UK; Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Essex, UK; Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland; and Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He is currently Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics at Fribourg University, Adjunct Professor of Sociolinguistics, Agder University, Kristiansand, Norway; and Adjunct Professor at the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. He is writing a book to be entitled Sociolinguistic Typology: Language in Contact and Isolation.

THEO VENNEMANN gen. Nierfeld, studied mathematics, physics, Germanic philology, Indo-European, and philosophy in Göttingen, Marburg, and Los Angeles. He received his PhD in Germanic Languages from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1968 and taught there as professor until 1974. He then took up the the Chair of Germanic and Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Munich until his retirement in 2005. His research interests include phonology, word order, metrics, the theory of language change, the history of German and other Indo-European languages, and the linguistic prehistory of Europe as reflected in external influences on Indo-European. Most of his work on Vasconic influences is included in his book Europa Vasconica – Europa Semitica (edited by Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna, 2003, Mouton de Gruyter). A bibliography can be found in David Restle and Dietmar Zaefferer (eds.), Sounds and Systems: Studies in Structure and Change (2002, Mouton de Gruyter).

KEES VERSTEEGH is professor of Arabic and Islam at the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He has written about the history of the Arabic grammatical tradition and about the history of Arabic. His publications include Pidginization and Creolization: The Case of Arabic (1984, John Benjamins), and The Arabic Language (1997, Edinburgh University Press). He is the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics (4 vols., 2006–9, Brill).

DONALD WINFORD is Professor of Linguistics at Ohio State University. His research interests include sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, creole linguistics as well as African American English. He is currently editor of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages and the author of Predication in Caribbean English Creoles (1993, John Benjamins) and An Introduction to Contact Linguistics (2003, Blackwell).

Preface

Contact studies is a field of linguistics which has been the subject of increasing interest in the past few decades and the present volume is intended to reflect this interest by gathering together contributions by leading authors in the field. The volume deals with both individual cases of language contact and more general issues of the relationship of contact studies to other areas of linguistics. The individual studies are exemplary illustrations of a range of contact scenarios while the more general chapters deal with the interface of language contact with such areas as typology, language history, dialectology, sociolinguistics, and pidgin and creole studies.

The genesis of this volume was marked by a fruitful collaboration between the editor and the colleagues who contributed. This congenial experience was unfortunately overshadowed by the death of one of the scholars in the project, Michael Noonan (1948–2009) of the University of Wisconsin, known affectionately as “Mickey” to his friends. His sudden departure was an unexpected and painful loss to all who knew him.

The work on this project was greatly facilitated by the efficiency, professionalism, and helpfulness shown by the staff of Wiley-Blackwell, in particular by Danielle Descoteaux, Julia Kirk, and Anna Oxbury. To them I would like to express my sincere thanks for all that they have done in the production of this volume.

Raymond Hickey

Language Contact: Reconsideration and Reassessment

RAYMOND HICKEY

The most cursory glance at linguistic publications in the past few decades reveals a wealth of literature on language contact: articles, monographs, edited volumes, special issues of journals (see the references in the literature section to this chapter).¹ It is perhaps true to say that one of the major impulses for research in the past two decades must surely have been the publication of Sarah Thomason and Terrence Kaufman’s large-scale study of various contact scenarios with many generalizations about the nature of contact and the range of its possible effects (Thomason & Kaufman 1988). Due to the carefully mounted cases and several stringent analyses, this study led to the re-invigorization of language contact studies and the re-valorization of language contact as a research area. As well as highlighting the field of language contact within linguistics, the study also allowed for virtually any type of change as a result of language contact, given appropriate circumstances to trigger this.

Contact studies from the 1960s and 1970s are not anything like as copious as in the ensuing decades. There are reasons for this. While the classic study of language contact by Uriel Weinreich was published in 1953, the following two decades were years which saw not just the heyday of early generative linguistics but also the rise of sociolinguistics, and it was those two directions in linguistics which were to dominate the research activity of scholars for a number of decades.