It is hardly surprising that contact-based influence on Arabic, with over 300 million native speakers spoken from Uzbekistan to Morocco to northeast Nigeria, has been important. This article walks through eight different historical and cultural stages of contact, beginning with the under-reported story of pre- and early Islamic Aramaic–Arabic contact. Emerging from the shadow of Aramaic to become the dominant language of the Middle East and southern Mediterranean, Arabic left behind interesting minorities in Andalusia (Spain), Malta, and Cyprus, each marked by special sources of influence from Romance languages and Greek, and in the case of Uzbekistan Arabic, pushed to the point of mixed language status by co-territorial Dari and Uzbek. In the Sudanic region, native varieties have undergone profound influence from co-territorial African languages – Kanuri influence is illustrated here – but only in specific domains of grammar. Elsewhere in Africa, contact has been so intense and so compressed that entirely new pidgin-creole varieties (Nubi/Juba Arabic) have emerged. Arabic-internal contact – inter-dialectal and Standard Arabic – constitutes a continuing dynamic within Arabic societies. Arabic represents an open challenge to general theories of contact – Dixon, van Coetsam, Labov – as important to the study of Arabic as to the study of linguistics.

The chapter focuses on area diffusion and linguistic areas in the Amazon Basin, one of the linguistically most diverse regions in the world. The long-term history of language interaction in the linguistically highly diverse basin of the Amazon Basin has been marred by a large scale language extinction and obliteration of contact patterns. At present, the Vaupés River Basin area is the best established linguistic area. Linguistic and cultural features of neighbouring languages in the Upper Rio Negro region, and in the basin of neighbouring Caquetá and Putumayo, point towards possible areal diffusion in the past. The Upper Xingu region is a well-established cultural area; however, given its relatively shallow time depth, its status as a linguistic area is questionable. A number of other regions within Amazonia show traces of possible language contact with inconclusive evidence in favour of long-standing areal diffusion. A number of pan-Amazonian features are shared by genetically unrelated, and often geographically remote, languages. These may well reflect traces of linguistic contact that can no longer be recovered.

The dispersal of Bantu-speaking people from their ancestral homeland in the borderland between current-day Nigeria and Cameroon across most of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa had a significant impact on the languages, cultures, and demography of autochthonous populations. Inversely, foragers and pastoralists also considerably contributed to the gene pool of Bantu-speaking communities, the speciation of their languages, and the evolution of their cultures. In this chapter, the impact of indigenous languages on Bantu language variation is assessed by comparing the language contact situations in Southern and Central Africa. Southern Africa is much better documented, because the much shallower time depth of contact between Bantu-speaking newcomers and autochthonous populations allowed the latter to survive as separate populations, often maintaining a language unrelated to Bantu. In Central Africa, the dispersal of Bantu languages is much older. Together with the success of other families, such as Ubangi and Central-Sudanic, it led to the death of all languages previously spoken by rainforest hunter-gatherers. Still little is therefore known about prehistoric language contact between indigenous forest foragers and immigrant communities. Nonetheless, Southern Africa provides us with useful insights to be tested in Central Africa.

Co-work of laborers of different languages occurred since ancient times. Postulates for one “national” language usually stem from members of a dominant culture. Labor as well as elite migrations over time and across regions of different, but related languages led to shared composite languages. This was the case of the Roman language, while the Ottoman one was an intended neutral overlay; in the Balkans transhumant herders provided connections, as did merchants, traders, and transport and artisanal workers in Southeast Asia. From the nineteenth-century emergence of “national” cultures and, subsequently, of virulent nationalisms in Europe, imposition of the respective majority language became an aspect of national ideologies. Home-state demands for language retention were counterproductive to the economic and cultural interests of most emigrants making their home in a new language environment. Their language adaptation depended on intended length of stay, interaction with “native” speakers, and language brokers facilitating linguistic transitions. Forced labor migrants, like African-origin slaves in the Americas, had to develop common idioms under duress; many had experiences with trader communities’ linguae francae. Labor migrants did not simply adapt to the language of the receiving society but they influenced the majoritarian languages.

This chapter traces the expansion of English from its beginnings to its present-day global role. Viewed from a geographical perspective, settlement moves and colonization have re-rooted the English language to different continents and countries, producing distinct contact types. We outline these developments from their historical and demographic perspectives as well as with respect to linguistic contact conditions for North America (including African American English), Southern Hemisphere varieties (Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa), and second-language postcolonial Englishes in Africa and Asia. In addition, it is shown how recent, vibrant processes have established new forms of English in new contexts, including non-postcolonial countries, lingua franca uses, and in cyberspace, thus producing radically new contact ecologies. Contact scenarios in these processes have involved dialect contact between native speakers from different regions, the process of structural nativization based on local feature pools, various degrees of restructuring and creole formation, and the genesis of hybrid varieties and innovative multilingual settings. We outline theoretical approaches to grasp these processes, including the Dynamic Model of the evolution of postcolonial Englishes, the Extra- and Intra-territorial Forces Model, and the postulate of different types of “nativeness.”

The Chinese diaspora comprises sizeable ethnic Chinese populations spread across the globe. Although Chinese diasporic communities share a common heritage and, by definition, a common heritage language, their sociolinguistic backgrounds and identities are diverse, complex, and multifaceted. Members of the diaspora speak one or more, or indeed none, of several mutually unintelligible Chinese varieties and dialects. Recent changes in the demographics of the overseas Chinese communities have, moreover, led to new patterns of multilingualism. This chapter discusses key sociolinguistic aspects of language contact relevant to this group at large, including language maintenance versus language loss, the trends and challenges of heritage language learning, the role of Chinese community schools, differences in attitudes towards Chinese dialects, and the dynamics of multilingual identities and multilingual practices such as translanguaging and language brokering. The review focuses on the diasporic communities in Anglophone and other Western settings, as it is mainly the rising numbers of ethnic Chinese in those parts of the world that have fuelled the growing interest in Chinese heritage language learning and research in recent decades.

Several conditions of the Korean diaspora offer unique opportunities for the study of language contact. These include the diverse routes and sites of migration that have defined the movement of overseas Koreans throughout the past century; the relatively strong linguistic and cultural homogeneity of Korean society and the prominent role that the Korean language plays as an index of Korean identity; and the recent shift from long-term migration towards flexible, short-term migration that characterizes the Korean diaspora today. This chapter addresses these issues through a survey of the history and sociolinguistic conditions of the Korean diaspora. After an overview of the Korean diaspora’s historical and geographical context, it considers the general trends of language maintenance and attrition in various Korean communities around the world. It also considers how language ideology serves as an important condition for the language maintenance of diasporic Koreans, as well as the more recent rise of flexible migration and shifting linguistic practice in the Korean diaspora.

In this chapter, I provide a historical and linguistic account of the ways in which French was introduced and spread to some parts of the African continent and then diversified along a basilect-to-acrolect continuum. I show the different communicative functions it plays in the new ecologies where it evolved. In environments where major African languages are used as vehicular languages, French enjoys limited communicative functions, mainly restricted to formal interactions such as in school, public administration, and government. Conversely, in ecologies where no indigenous lingua franca had emerged, it is used in daily interactions to communicate across ethnolinguistic groups. I then address the questions of why schooling hasn’t contributed to the spread of French in the post-colonial era despite the significant increase of the school population and why it has not speciated into different regional varieties drastically different from those of the former metropoles (viz., France and Belgium). Finally, I present contrastive examples of Camfranglais/Francanglais (Cameroun) and Nouchi (Côte d’Ivoire) and argue that the latter may be the only variety that has speciated into a new one very different from that of France.

Five-hundred years ago, Europeans finally “discovered” Malay, the undisputed language of Southeast Asian commerce and diplomacy of that time. In this chapter, we look into the role of Malay in the early modern era so we can understand the processes that have contributed to its continued diffusion and diversification in this century. We look at the spread of Malay, not by mass migration, but through language convergence and language shift. Malay, whether a national language (named Malay and Indonesian) or a local dialect spoken by a small ethnic minority, is one of the world’s major languages. Its geographic and demographic expansion can be linked to numerous factors, among them: language shift as a component of broader cultural change; consolidation of diverse ethnicities; immigrant accommodation to the majority population; and early use in national educational systems. But the underlying basis and strength of Malay is its centuries old geographic and societal diffusion. On the one hand, its national-language status has triggered the significant growth we are witnessing now. On the other hand, the creativity of its speakers using diverse social and regional dialects sustains that growth, reflected in its large profile in today’s electronic media, such as Facebook.

Originating from its relatively tiny native speaking population on the narrow East African coastal strip and its adjacent islands, the Swahili language today has spread throughout East and Central Africa to become the most widely spoken African language after Arabic. This chapter explores the various forces – trade, religion, education, wars, and urbanization – that have led to this momentous linguistic expansion over the years. In the process, the language came in contact with a number of other languages – of international traders and invaders like the Arabs and the Portuguese, of settler communities of Indian and Arabic descent, and of a broad range of African ethnic groups inland – that resulted in the emergence of new varieties of the language. In conclusion, the chapter will look at how, through the different spaces and contexts of linguistic contact, Swahili came to impact on other languages of East and Central Africa.

Language contact in South Asia has been studied since the early nineteenth century. The prevailing approach operates with the concept of “substratum influence” or “subversion,” a unilateral structural influence of one language or language family on another. An alternate approach operates with the notion “convergence,” a bi- or multi-directional structural interaction between languages in contact. Evidence from the interaction between English and South Asian languages, as well as many South Asian languages with each other, lends strong support to the second approach and suggests that apparent cases of unilateral influence in South Asia deserve reexamination.

For convergence to take place, a pattern of long-standing non-replacive bi- or multilingualism is required. This pattern is now endangered by the fact the states of India, organized in terms of different majority languages, are making use of the state language mandatory in public affairs and government jobs. As a consequence there is a relatively sudden shift from minority languages to state languages, and “tribal languages” spoken by marginalized groups are greatly endangered.