Introduction

In the preceding chapters, Australian data on and from bi- and trilinguals speaking immigrant languages in contact with English has been used as examples to explore various dynamics of language contact – of shift, convergence and transference, transversion, plurilingual processing and cultural values in contact discourse.

Data

The linguistic data analyzed is from plurilinguals speaking languages of different typologies in contact with English. This has made it possible to ascertain the effects of typological and sociolinguistic factors on particular language contact and change phenomena. For example, are the factors universal or language/culture-specific and individual? Each of the language dyads and triads gives us the opportunity to consider a different configuration of factors and issues. Each language has had a different migration and settlement history which impacts on rates of language maintenance/use and shift. Central to this monograph are the terms transference – the use of forms, features or structures from another language – and transversion – the crossing over from one language to another. The data has enabled us to focus on transference and convergence phenomena and the facilitation of transversion by overlap, transference and convergence phenomena – in a situation of rapid ‘language change’ (which might be attributed to ‘language attrition’). The processing implications of these phenomena were also considered. The data across languages indicates three facilitation principles promoting transversion from one language to another – lexical, tonal and syntactic.