The Routledge Handbook of Language Contact provides an overview of the state of the art of current research in contact linguistics. Presenting contact linguistics as an established field of investigation in its own right and featuring 26 chapters, this handbook brings together a broad range of approaches to contact linguistics, including:
- experimental and observational approaches and formal theories;
- a focus on social and cognitive factors that impact the outcome of language contact situations and bilingual language processing;
- the emergence of new languages and speech varieties in contact situations, and contact linguistic phenomena in urban speech and linguistic landscapes.
With contributions from an international range of leading and emerging scholars in their fields, the four sections of this text deal with methodological and theoretical approaches, the factors that condition and shape language contact, the impact of language contact on individuals, and language change, repertoires and formation.
This handbook is an essential reference for anyone with an interest in language contact in particular regions of the world, including Anatolia, Eastern Polynesia, the Balkans, Asia, Melanesia, North America, and West Africa.
About the Author:
Evangelia Adamou is Senior Researcher at the CNRS (France). She specializes in the analysis of endangered languages with a focus on language contact and bilingualism, combining corpus and experimental methods. Recent publications include: A Corpus-Driven Approach to Language Contact (2016, De Gruyter Mouton) and The Adaptive Bilingual Mind (under contract, Cambridge University Press).
Yaron Matras is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester. His research interests include contact linguistics, urban multilingualism, typology, and language documentation. He has worked on dialects of Romani, German, Kurdish, and other languages, and is the founder of the Multilingual Manchester research unit.
