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, incl
