This chapter discusses the changing representation of suicide in selected Japanese literary and visual texts, focusing on four twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels (Kokoro by Natsume Soseki [1914], The Silent Cry by Kenzaburo Oe [1967], Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami [1987], and Gray Men by Tomotake Ishikawa [2012]), selected films and manga. The chapter argues that the discussed texts have departed from the historic/nationalistic notion of suicide as noble death in favour of a more Gothic positioning of the theme. This Gothic dimension is realised predominantly through the construction of the characters and the bleak landscapes they inhabit. Alienated from society; often living in self-imposed exile; prone to depression, or other forms of mental illness; trapped in toxic, dysfunctional relationships and elaborate masochistic rituals, these melancholy individuals accept suicide with fatalistic abandon as an inevitable conclusion to their insignificant lives, or embrace it as the ultimate act of non-conformism and defiance against authority. The chapter also examines apocalyptic visions of ‘nightmare Japan’ in films like Sion Sono’s controversial Suicide Circle (2001) and the manga it inspired (Furuya  Ukamaru, 2002), where suicide becomes symbolic of the ways that adults have failed the younger generations.

Thomas Ligotti, who began writing in the 1980s, is perhaps Gothic's best-kept secret. Until the recent publication of his first two collections of short stories by Penguin, his Gothic work (reminiscent, but by no means derivative, of Poe and Lovecraft) has remained relatively obscure. This chapter explores what could be termed Ligotti's materialistic pessimism, or the belief that conscious and rational life is inherently tragic, as it is largely dominated by the experience of pain and the realisation of the inevitability of death. More specifically, the chapter focuses on one of Ligotti's recurring solutions to the quandary of existence, suicide, in selected stories from Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986), Grimscribe (1991), Teatro Grottesco (2006) and The Spectral Link (2014), but also in his non-fiction treatise The Conspiracy against the Human Race (2010) and his interviews in Born to Fear (2014). For Ligotti, antinatalism, or mass suicide as a way of preventing future generations from suffering the same fate, becomes an appealing, perhaps even the only real, option for a human race who has, thus far, preferred to believe in the absurdity of futurity and the fallacy of persistence.

The chapter argues that theories of grammaticalization as an independent unidirectional development of a lexical item into a functional item are misleading. Adopting a uniformitarian perspective, he submits that change involves three interrelated factors: The first, the process of recombination, refers to an innate human cognitive capacity which allows speaker/signer-learners (SL) to select specific linguistic features and recombine them into new syntactic variants. The second represents the feature pool of the variants to which SLs are exposed through contact; they are subject to the process of competition and selection. The third, commonly referred to as grammaticalization, has to do with population factors which may favor or hinder the spread of specific variants across a speech community.

Contrary to this approach based on universal multilingualism and contact as cornerstones of acquisition and change (Aboh 2015, 2020), classic examples of grammaticalization are particularly misleading because they aggregate different populations of different SL profiles as if they involved homogeneous monolingual or monomodal communities living in identical ecologies. Likewise, commonly used notions such as language-internal vs. contact-induced change become obsolete because they conceive of contact as the exceptional case. The author shows that language change is always the result of contact.

Applying historical ethnography, the chapter demonstrates that the nature of the interactions between Africans and the French along the West African coast from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries did not favor the development of either a French-based creole or a pidgin. When the first French traders arrived in West Africa they capitalized on the century-long trade routes and social networks established by the Portuguese. They formed partnerships with powerful female commercial partners, who acted as language and cultural brokers between African and French traders. Over time, trading practices evolved from direct exchanges requiring mutual language learning to the emergence of professional interpreters, making it less necessary for the trading partners to learn each other’s language. By the eighteenth century, the French engaged in military conquests. The nature of interactions between African recruits and French officers and the types of population structures in which the former were inserted, did not favor the emergence of a pidgin-like variety identified in creolistics as Français Tirailleur. A detailed analysis of some of the grammatical structures of this putative variety suggests that Français Tirailleur was likely fabricated by those who described or quoted it in their books.

In recent decades, scholars have examined the genesis of Jewish language varieties, particularly Yiddish, as well as Modern Hebrew, drawing intriguing parallels with creole formation processes. This chapter delves into the ecological aspects of language contact, comparing the sociohistorical and linguistic contexts of Jewish language emergence with Caribbean plantation creoles. Particular emphasis is placed on Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), tracing its linguistic trajectory following the traumatic expulsion of Sephardic Jews from Spain in 1492. By applying the “Founder Principle,” the research investigates the linguistic repertoires of founding populations, examining their social stratification, literacy capabilities, familial structures, and intricate social networks.