For a number ofyears we have been doing research and teaching courses on different aspects of language contact. René Appel has worked on minortry languages and particularlyon the educational problems of children of migrant workers in the Netherlands. Pierer Muysken has focused on Quechua-Sparush language contact in the Andes, relating this 10more genera! aspects ofcreo!ization and language mixture.

Particularly in planning our courses on language contact, bowever, we feit that the problems and concepts bath of'us had been dealing with were closely interrelated. It came to be a challenge to explore the relations between social, psychological and (socio) linguistic aspects of Ianguage contact more explicitly in this book. We are not eertam that our exploration has been successful everywhere, given that so many disciplines with different research tradinons are involved.

We would like to thank all the students and fellow researchers at the Instirure of General Linguistics ofthe University of Amsterdam who have commemed on earlier versions of material contained in this book. To conclude, we would like to acknowledge an indebtedness that wiJl be obvious ro all insiders: we have named our book with the title of Uriel Weinreich's ploneering work, Languages in contact in rnind. We are quire aware rhat it remains difficult to go beyond tbe depth ofinsight achieved in Weinreich's writings.

Amsterdam, September 1986