Language Contact: An Introduction

In this survey of the social, political and linguistic consequences of language contact, Sarah G. Thomason focuses on what happens to the languages themselves - sometimes nothing, sometimes new words enter a language, sometimes new sounds and sentence structures will spread across many languages in a large geographical region; more rarely, entirely new languages arise in a contact situation. Conversely, one of the languages in contact may vanish entirely, and issues of language endangerment and death are explored here, together with chapters on multilingualism, pidgins and creoles, mechanisms of interference and the origins and results of contact-induced language change.