The Handbook of Language Contact

Language contact has an impact upon virtually all aspects of language change, and is increasingly a major topic of research within linguistics. The Handbook of Language Contact encompasses every area of language contact in a systematic and focused approach, and contains 40 specially commissioned essays by a team of globally renowned scholars who offer a wide–ranging exploration of the field. The volume contains numerous case studies from languages across the world, attesting to the variety and linguistic significance of this subject. This authoritative handbook is accessibly structured into sections exploring the place of contact studies within linguistics as a whole; the value of contact studies for research into language change; and language contact in the context of work on language and society. The final section of the volume offers a representative cross–section of individual studies which reappraise the role of language contact in their respective contexts. The Handbook is an essential reference for linguists working in the fields of language contact and change, language theory, sociolinguistics, and bilingualism.

Notes on Contributors. Preface. Language Contact: Reconsideration and Reassessment ( R aymond H ickey ). Part I Contact and Linguistics. 1 Contact Explanations in Linguistics ( S arah T homason ). 2 Genetic Classification and Language Contact ( M ichael N oonan ). 3 Contact, Convergence, and Typology ( Y aron M atras ). 4 Contact and Grammaticalization ( B ernd Heine and Tania K uteva ). 5 Language Contact and Grammatical Theory ( K aren P. C orrigan ). 6 Computational Models and Language Contact ( A pril McM ahon ). Part II Contact and Change. 7 Contact and Language Shift ( R aymond H ickey ). 8 Contact and Borrowing ( D onald W inford ). 9 Contact and Code–Switching ( P enelope Gardner–C hloros ). 10 Contact and Dialectology ( D avid B ritain ). 11 Contact and New Varieties ( P aul K erswill ). 12 Contact and Change: Pidgins and Creoles ( J ohn H olm ). Part III Contact and Society. 13 Scenarios for Language Contact ( P ieter M uysken ). 14 Ethnic Identity and Linguistic Contact ( C armen F ought ). 15 Contact and Sociolinguistic Typology ( P eter T rudgill ). 16 Contact and Language Death ( S uzanne R omaine ). 17 Fieldwork in Contact Situations ( C laire B owern ). Part IV Case Studies of Contact. 18 Macrofamilies, Macroareas, and Contact ( J ohanna N ichols ). 19 Contact and Prehistory: The Indo–European Northwest ( T heo V ennemann ). 20 Contact and the History of Germanic Languages ( P aul R oberge ). 21 Contact and the Early History of English ( M arkku F ilppula ). 22 Contact and the Development of American English ( J oseph C. Salmons and Thomas C. P urnell ). 23 Contact Englishes and Creoles in the Caribbean ( E dgar W. S chneider ). 24 Contact and Asian Varieties of English ( U mberto A nsaldo ). 25 Contact and African Englishes ( R ajend M esthrie ). 26 Contact and the Celtic Languages ( J oseph F. E ska ). 27 Spanish and Portuguese in Contact ( J ohn M. L ipski ). 28 Contact and the Development of the Slavic Languages ( L enore A. G renoble ). 29 Contact and the Finno–Ugric Languages ( J ohanna L aakso ). 30 Language Contact in the Balkans ( B rian D. J oseph ). 31 Contact and the Development of Arabic ( K ees V ersteegh ). 32 Turkic Language Contacts ( L ars J ohanson ). 33 Contact and North American Languages ( M arianne M ithun ). 34 Language Contact in Africa: A Selected Review ( G. T ucker C hilds ). 35 Contact and Siberian Languages ( B rigitte P akendorf ). 36 Language Contact in South Asia ( H arold F. S chiffman ). 37 Language Contact and Chinese ( S tephen M atthews ). 38 Contact and Indigenous Languages in Australia ( P atrick McC onvell ). 39 Language Contact in the New Guinea Region ( W illiam A. F oley ). 40 Contact Languages of the Pacific ( J eff S iegel ). Author Index. Subject Index.

Raymond Hickey is Professor of Linguistics at Essen University, Germany. His main areas of research are varieties of English (especially Irish English) and general questions of language contact, shift, and change as well as computer corpus processing. He has published widely, the most recent titles being A Sound Atlas of Irish English (2004), Legacies of Colonial English (2004), Dublin English: Evolution and Change (2005), Irish English: History and Present–Day Forms (2007), and Eighteenth–Century English: Ideology and Change (2010). He has also published over 80 articles on various issues within linguistics and produced an electronic corpus of Irish English.

“This volume represents a welcome addition to the literature on language contact, assembling contributions from international experts to offer an extensive resource which encompasses a broad range of language contact research.”  ( The Linguist List , 12 April 2014) "Despite its century–long history, contact linguistics has received unprecedented attention in the past decades, and it is in this context that one must view the publication of ′′The handbook of contact linguistics′′ (henceforth HLC), edited by Raymond Hickey for the Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics series. While a handbook is essentially a reference work aimed at introducing particular concepts for a given discipline, it is also, by its encompassing nature, an opportunity to capture the current state of that discipline and the directions in which it is moving." (The Linguist, 6 January 2012)