Understanding Language Contact

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,...