Synopsis: This edited volume pays tribute to traditional and innovative language contact research, bringing together contributors with expertise on different languages examining general phenomena of language contact and specific linguistic features which arise in language contact scenarios. A particular focus lies on contact between languages of unbalanced political and symbolic power, language contact and group identity, and the linguistic and societal implications of language contact settings, especially considering contemporary global migration streams.

Drawing on various methodological approaches, among others, corpus and contrastive linguistics, linguistic landscapes, sociolinguistic interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, the contributions describe phenomena of language contact between and with Romance languages, Semitic languages, and English(es).

Synopsis: This volume provides a collection of research reports on multilingualism and language contact ranging from Romance, to Germanic, Greco and Slavic languages in situations of contact and diaspora. Most of the contributions are empirically-oriented studies presenting first-hand data based on original fieldwork, and a few focus directly on the methodological issues in such research. Owing to the multifaceted nature of contact and diaspora phenomena (e.g. the intrinsic transnational essence of contact and diaspora, and the associated interplay between majority and minoritized languages and multilingual practices in different contact settings, contact-induced language change, and issues relating to convergence) the disciplinary scope is broad, and includes ethnography, qualitative and quantitative sociolinguistics, formal linguistics, descriptive linguistics, contact linguistics, historical linguistics, and language acquisition. Case studies are drawn from Italo-Romance varieties in the Americas, Spanish-Nahuatl contact, Castellano Andino, Greko/Griko in Southern Italy, Yiddish in Anglophone communities, Frisian in the Netherlands, Wymysiöryś in Poland, Sorbian in Germany, and Pomeranian and Zeelandic Flemish in Brazil.

This book brings together papers that discuss social and structural aspects of language contact and language change.

Several papers look at the relevance of historical documents to determine the linguistic nature of early contact varieties, while others investigate the specific processes of contact-induced change that were involved in the emergence and development of these languages. A third set of papers look at how new datasets and greater sensitivity to social issues can help to (re)assess persistent theoretical and empirical questions as well as help to open up new avenues of research. In particular they highlight the heterogeneity of contemporary language practices and attitudes often obscured in sociolinguistic research.

The contributions all focus on language variation and change but investigate it from a variety of disciplinary and empirical perspectives and cover a range of linguistic contexts.

Synopsis: After celebrating the International workshop « Spanish varieties in contact or heterogeneous language practices » in Paris in 2017, this volume brings together ten scientific contributions offering a change of perspective on the description of contact-induced variation and change phenomena in the Spanish-speaking world, based on new methodological and theoretical frameworks. This change of perspective implies to move from the analysis of “systems” and “codes” in contact, and its outcomes, to the description and analysis of heterogeneous language practices that focuses on the use of semiotic and linguistic resources by speakers to express messages, to transmit knowledge, or to take positions and epistemic and affective stances, that is, to create meaning. The aim of this book is to question, from different perspectives and backgrounds, the notion of contact as just simply the influence of systems or codes and, rather, to propose a dynamic view centered on the use of linguistic heterogeneous resources by social actors living in complex contact settings involving the contact of languages such as Spanish, Quechua, Guaraní, Yukuna, Mapuzugún, Otomí, Chichimeca jonaz, and Tepehuano del sureste. This book brings together contributions from well-known specialists and young researchers of language contact such as Carol Klee, Azucena Palacios, Isabelle Léglise, Carola Mick, Aura Lemus, Magdalena Lemus, Ignacio Satti, Mario Soto, Aldo Olate Vinet, Alonso Guerrero Galván, Nadiezdha Torres Sánchez, Élodie Blestel, and Santiago Sánchez Moreano. The volume is divided in two sections. The first one: "Methodological and theoretical perspectives" includes four contributions offering innovative guidelines and perspectives for the study of contact-induced variation and change. These perspectives, although they have been widely worked in linguistic anthropology and ethnographic sociolinguistics, for example, have been on the contrary not yet well explored in the field of language contact in the “Spanish-speaking world”. The second section is entitled “Applied perspectives” and includes five contributions offering new theoretically and methodologically views on language contact.

The study of grammatical variation in language mixing has been at the core of research into bilingual language practices. Although various motivations have been proposed in the literature to account for possible mixing patterns, some of them are either controversial, or remain untested. Little is still known about whether and how frequency of use of linguistic elements can contribute to the patterning of bilingual talk. This book is the first to systematically explore the factor usage frequency in a corpus of bilingual speech. The two aims are (i) to describe and analyze the variation in mixing patterns in the speech of Russia German adolescents and young adults in Germany, and (ii) to propose and test usage-based explanations of variation in mixing patterns in three morphosyntactic contexts: the adjective-modified noun phrase, the prepositional phrase, and the plural marking of German noun insertions in bilingual sentences. In these contexts, German noun insertions combine with either Russian or German words and grammatical markers, thus yielding mixed bilingual and German monolingual constituents in otherwise Russian sentences, the latter also labelled as embedded-language islands. The results suggest that the frequency with which words are used together mediates the distribution of mixing patterns in each of the examined contexts. The differing impacts of co-occurrence frequency are attributed to the distributional and semantic specifics of the analyzed morphosyntactic configurations. Lexical frequency has been found to be another important determinant in this variation. Other factors include recency, or lexical priming, in discourse in the case of prepositional phrases, and phonological and structural similarities and differences in the inflectional systems of the contact languages in the case of plural marking.

The purpose of this book is to present recent studies in the field of multilingualism and L3, bringing together contributions from an international group of specialists from Austria, Canada, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and United States. The main focuses of the articles are three: language acquisition, language learning and teaching.

A collection of theoretical and empirical articles from scholars of multilingualism and language acquisition makes the book a significant resource as the papers present a wide perspective from main theories to current issues, reflecting new trends in the field.

The authors focus on the heterogeneity and complexity that characterize third language acquisition, multilingual learning and teaching. As the issues addressed in this book intersect, it represents an asset and therefore the texts will be of great relevance for the scientific community.

Part I presents different topics of L3 acquisition, such as syntax, phonology, working memory and selective attention, and lexicon. Part II comprises texts that show how the research on language acquisition informs pedagogical issues. For instance, the role of the knowledge of previous languages in the teaching of L3, the attitudes of multilingual teachers to plurilingual approaches, and the benefits of crosslinguistic pedagogy versus classroom monolingual bias. In sequence, Part III consists of texts on individual learning strategies, such as motivation and attitudes, crosslinguistic awareness, and students’ perceptions about teachers’ “plurilingual nonnativism”.

This volume offers a synthesis of current expertise on contact-induced change in Arabic and its neighbours, with thirty chapters written by many of the leading experts on this topic. Its purpose is to showcase the current state of knowledge regarding the diverse outcomes of contacts between Arabic and other languages, in a format that is both accessible and useful to Arabists, historical linguists, and students of language contact.