Origins of contact varieties are at the center of language contact research, focusing on the dynamics between the population structure’s social ecology and the linguistic phenomena that emerge. This chapter proposes an alternative hypothesis to the emergence of Andean Spanish, a macro-dialect spoken in several countries in western South America and product of contact between Spanish and Andean languages, particularly Quechua, the most spoken in the Americas. It argues that contrasts between the linguistic evidence present in colonial documents authored by Indigenous individuals and those present in the speech of Andean Spanish speakers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reveal different types of contact phenomena. The colonial data include linguistic evidence of lexical borrowing (primarily cultural) and grammatical phenomena proper of second language speakers (e.g., number and gender agreement, vocalic alternation). The post-colonial data include evidence of grammaticalization phenomena, revealing a case of contra-hierarchical grammatical influence (from the minoritized Indigenous language to the hegemonic language). The contrast between these two historical periods’ internal social ecologies reveals specific (types of) social conditions that help explain the focusing and emergence of the contact (macro-)dialect known as Andean Spanish.

Diaspora formation, like that of ethnic enclaves, is a process to be analyzed according to gender, generation, and social status given different spheres of communication and thus different linguistic registers. Children of migrants, in particular when attending school in the receiving society, form again different registers and, more than their parents, communicate with peers of the new majority language or of several languages. Linguistic métissage (“hybridization”) is a generational phenomenon. A functional analysis of “ethnic” elites indicates that clerics, journalists, and writers, in contrast to managers and mediators with the outside world, advocated language retention, since liturgies, literary writings, and culture-of-origin news may not easily be transposed into another language. Common people, on the other hand, in order to cope with challenges of their daily diasporic lives, needed quick rudimentary competence in the receiving country’s language. Language hybridization, in contrast to an established koine, involves a language of parental origin and a language of peer group and school socialization out of the context of parental cultural background and out of intense integration into the receiving society. Thus, diasporic language formation occurs in a process of merging and recontextualizing.

Andean linguistics has underestimated the role of states in the spreading of languages and dialectal fusion processes. This chapter deals with the spread of Quechua in the Inca and colonial eras. It first reconstructs the communicative functions performed by different varieties of this language in the Inca empire and brings to light the factors that determined the formation of koine varieties and their rapid diffusion. Mass migrations led by the Inca state have been the main factor in these processes of koineization. This chapter then shows how the colonial regime drastically intensified the centrifugal dynamics that have been exerted since the Inca era on the Andean communities, making the Spanish economic sphere (cities, mines, and haciendas) the focus of a new expansion and vernacularization of Quechua. Finally, it compares the historical-linguistic evolution of three Andean regions in colonial times (Ecuador, Central Peru and the Ayacucho region of Peru).

This chapter discusses how migration and trade as historical sociocultural processes have contributed to language spread and language contact situations in Latin America. It explores how language contact situations in Latin America have been dynamically created and changed by the movement of peoples and exchange of things and ideas through space and time, focusing on three kinds of linguistic outcomes: language spread, the emergence of multilingualism, and the development of contact languages. The discussion is framed by an interdisciplinary framework, focusing on the internal and external histories of indigenous languages of Latin America, from the initial peopling of the New World up to contemporary situations of language contact.

This chapter is a historical overview of the maintenance and loss of heritage languages in ten waves of India's diaspora spread over six continents. Various factors that contributed to language maintenance and loss at the community level are discussed. The social and political conditions in the new homelands have played a significant role in preserving and losing the heritage languages. While some diasporic communities have held on to their heritage languages for generations, most of them lost them rapidly after relocating from their motherland. Fascination for western cultures has played havoc on immigrant languages. This chapter's discussion goes beyond the oft-debated factor of “attitude” and digs a little deeper to suggest that the real-life need for the language is the primary cause of language use and retention. If the need is lacking or even vague, the language gradually disappears. A real need for a language seems to be at the root of preventing language loss in immigrant communities. Toward the end, the paper presents a model of language advancement, language maintenance, and language revitalization.

The chapter re-positions the study of contact-induced language change in the context of the individual user’s management of a complex repertoire of linguistic structures. Taking as a point of departure the assumption that for multilinguals, boundaries among “languages” are permeable and subject to users’ creativity, I draw links between structural outcomes of contact and the inherent functions that structural categories have in information processing in communication. Topics covered include code-switching, lexical borrowing, functional and grammatical borrowing, and convergence and contact-induced grammaticalization. I examine proposed hierarchies of borrowability in lexicon and grammar, and revisit the notion of “constraints” on borrowing. I argue in favour of an epistemology that identifies trends as worthy of attention even if isolated exceptions exist; and which seeks to derive explanatory models from such cross-linguistic trends. I conclude that the study of structural outcomes of language contact can contribute to a better understanding of the language faculty itself, and possibly even of key aspects of the evolution of human language.

Codeswitchingching, well known as a speech style in which bilinguals alternate languages between or within sentences, has recently been joined by a new term, translanguaging, which is widely used in bilingual education with a similar meaning. Among a variety of perspectives within the translanguaging literature, some scholars have adopted deconstructivism, the view that discrete languages and multilingualism do not actually exist. Deconstructivists see translanguaging as a theoretical alternative to codeswitching, as codeswitching implies internalized linguistic diversity. In this chapter, the author argues that the political use of language names (a concern of deconstructivists) can and should be distinguished from the social and structural idealizations used to study linguistic diversity, favoring what the author calls an Integrated Multilingual Model of bilingualism, contrasted with the Unitary and Dual Competence models. The author further distinguishes grammars from linguistic repertoires, arguing that bilinguals, like everybody, have a single linguistic repertoire but a richly diverse mental grammar, a viewpoint the author calls a multilingual perspective on translanguaging.

The Balkans were the first sprachbund (linguistic league, area, etc.) identified as a locus of contact-induced change owing to multi-lateral, multi-directional, mutual multilingualism to be identified as such. In this model, multilingualism is shared by speakers of the various languages, it is stable across generations, and it involves varied social groups. While no linguistic situation is unchanging, the combination of the factors mentioned here differentiates the sprachbund from other contact situations such as a diaspora, a colony, or that of endangered indigenous languages. Owing to the complexity of a sprachbund, the directionality of contact-induced change is not always discernible, nor is such directionality necessarily relevant, the point being the fact of convergence itself. This chapter defines the basic linguistic features relevant to the study of the Balkans as a linguistic area and also gives an overview of the linguistic study of the region. An important conclusion is the fact that the Balkan sprachbund continues to be a relevant lens through which language contact – both historical and ongoing – can be viewed.

For speakers of Arctic Indigenous languages, intense language contact has come as a result of colonization, leading to extensive shift and loss across different Arctic communities. Recent years have seen contact and shift intensified by a nexus of interrelated factors, or stressors, with urbanization, climate change, and the ongoing effects of colonization being among the most significant. The case study of the multilingual language ecologies in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in Russia shows how these factors affect language vitality and overall wellbeing. Greenland provides a contrastive example as the local ecologies differ considerably. The net impact of stressors on Arctic Indigenous communities has been language shift, but the communities are currently experiencing widespread interest in and commitment to increasing language vitality and usage, a pan-Arctic movement of revitalization and resilience to build language and cultural sustainability.

This chapter concerns the life-histories of lingua francas, languages adopted for communication among speakers who do not otherwise share a language. It recognizes four principal motives for developing a lingua franca: commerce, conquest, religious conversion, and cultural attraction. A lingua franca depends for its survival on the continuation in force of one or other of these motives, unless some user population adopts it as a mother-tongue, passing it on in the home, or dropping it for one purpose only to take it up afresh for another: this is Regeneration. Other paths, for decline of a lingua franca, include Ruin or Resignation, if the user community dissolves, and Relegation, if the use of the language is deliberately banned. In this framework, the careers of major languages (excluding European empires) are narrated: Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek in West Asia; Greek (again) and Latin in the Mediterranean and Europe; the sprouting and interaction of languages before European conquests in the Americas, and in Africa; Sanskrit, Persian, and later Malay in Southeast Asia, the interplay of Putonghua with other Chinese dialects across East Asia; and the rise of Hindi-Urdu in South Asia.

This chapter outlines the history of the development and spread of what became what we now know as the Sinitic (Chinese) languages and the effects that migrations, cultural contact, and national policies had on the development. This includes the initial migrations into Asia and then again from the Yellow River valley to the surrounding areas. These later migrations were generally into areas where other people already lived, and so there was mixing of the people and the cultures. This is one factor that created the different branches of Sinitic (“Chinese dialects”). The last section is on language coexistence in Modern China.

This chapter situates plurilingualism (at the individual level) and multilingualism (at the societal level), depending on the researcher’s approach to language contact, as enablers of various consequences of language contact. The relevant phenomena include language endangerment and loss (through language shift), codemixing and codeswitching (or translanguaging), the emergence of creoles, other mixed language varieties (including urban youth “stylects”), colonial varieties of European languages (such as Spanish), super-diversity, as well as structural change, borrowing, and the emergence of lingua francas. Concepts such as foreign workers’ interlanguages are contrasted with creoles and pidgins. Differences in their emergence are grounded in second language learning, degree and type of exposure to the hegemonic language, language shift, and the emergence of communal norms. The presentation in the chapter is generally grounded in population movements and changing population structures, therefore in speakers'/signers’ social history. It is also diachronic, explaining how domains of interest have evolved and expanded in language contact as a research area since the late nineteenth century, focusing on phenomena not elaborated in the chapters of Volume 1.