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.

Institutions play an important role in the management of multilingualism and can have a defining impact on language use. By granting more or less official status to certain forms of expression and language varieties, institutions legitimize some forms and varieties as more desirable targets of linguistic accommodation than others, which can affect speakers’ dominant language environments and influence the selection process of language change. This chapter outlines a socio-political approach to language standardization and interprets selected language policy and planning measures in terms of common mechanisms and outcomes of language contact in three western European states: France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Using the same historical timeline, it proposes a comparison of the circumstances under which national identities emerged in early modern and modern times, state boundaries were expanded through conquest, and more or less cultural homogeneity was achieved and enforced through language use. It is argued that even though ethnolinguistic diversity decreased considerably over time, different institutional responses to multilingualism led to different state-specific compromises that continue to shape language policies and planning in each of the three states today.

As a settler nation, the United States is a contact zone unto itself, with a dynamic ecology of migrating, multilingual speakers of minority and minoritized languages, and emergent language varieties. This chapter examines the linguistic, social, and political policies associated with many of these communities, drawing on research that examines the real and imagined pasts and presents of language users. Acknowledging the inherently political and ideological practice of separating and naming languages, the chapter focuses on the mobilization of diverse linguistic resources, highlighting the fluidity of multilingualism in US contexts. The chapter provides a broad and, by necessity, selective overview of Indigenous and immigrant language contact, change, loss, and survival in the US. Starting with a brief history and overview of current work with respect to immigrant languages, the chapter then describes examples of current research on Indigenous languages in the US. Discussion in each section is organized around contemporary research and theory on language status, language corpus, and language acquisition. The chapter concludes with consideration of the possibilities created by multilingual speakers’ adaptive strategies to help their languages survive and thrive in the US’s aggressively monoglossic context.

This chapter has three main objectives. This chapter first describes multilingualism as a natural force, deeply rooted in Asian and African societies prior to the emergence of nation-states and currently flourishing and evolving in India. Parts 2– 4 of this chapter provide evidence from pre-colonial India and its neighboring countries to underscore the differential evolution of Indian and Chinese political multilingualism in both qualitative and quantitative terms. The chapter closes by investigating the dynamics of linguistic, non-linguistic, and cultural forces in Southeast Asia and China, forces that shaped, sustained, and spread pre-and post-fifteenth-century Indian multilingualism in and outside India. Super-diversity is a key marker of Ancient as well as Modern India. This region represents a microcosm of different languages, races, religions, and cultures that have blended and brought about a special unity in diversity. The chapter shows that sustainable and stable Indian multilingualism defies the conventional belief that multilingualism cannot survive or flourish without a writing system and/or government intervention. Salient linguistic and ecological features are identified to highlight the exceptional nature of Indian multilingualism and its spread to Southeast Asia and China.

The sociolinguistic situation of the Channel Islands has meant that English has been spoken there alongside the native language, Norman, for several centuries, albeit in a diglossic relationship, with English assuming “High” functions (administration, legislation, education, media, and so forth) and Norman “Low” functions (familiar discourse with family and friends). The fact that, today, all speakers of the three extant varieties of Insular Norman (Jèrriais, Guernesiais, and Sercquiais) are also fluent in English has had far-reaching linguistic consequences in that the Norman spoken in the Channel Islands has diverged from the varieties spoken on the French mainland, and distinctive local varieties of Channel Island English have developed. Based on original data, this chapter provides an overview of the sociolinguistic setting that gave rise to this language contact and discusses some representative examples of contact-induced influence in the lexis, phonology, and morphosyntax of both Channel Island Norman and Channel Island English.

Language endangerment and loss is a longstanding phenomenon affecting both non-contact languages and contact languages, but contact languages are particularly susceptible. This endangerment has greatly increased and sped up in the last century. Case studies of several languages in China and Thailand show that structural change is often more rapid during language shift. Tujia has been receding for millennia in central China; Gong may have originated during contact between speakers of a variety of Burmese and several local languages in western Thailand several hundred years ago. Several small groups in western China speak languages developed in contact between speakers of Mongolic languages, Tibetan, and Chinese in western China in garrisons set up from about 700 years ago on. The final part of this chapter discusses how communities may be assisted to react to the endangerment of their language. While linguists can document a language, it is only the speakers and the community who can decide and act to maintain it. Some of the problems leading to endangerment and the strategies to overcome them are briefly discussed.

Societal multilingualism comes about in a number of ways, virtually all of them a result of cross-cultural contact and social necessity. It can have a long-term existence where – for example – political union has brought different language communities under one roof. It can be less permanent in others, as in situations where patterns of migration and assimilation lead, over time, to language erosion. Multilingualism can also reflect the simultaneous existence of varieties of greater and lesser prestige. It can have a simple de facto status, or it may reflect official or legislated policies at state or regional levels. Relatedly, multilingualism may arise “naturally” and without explicit instruction, or it may be a product of more formal educational undertakings. Multilingual capabilities may exist for instrumental communicative reasons, or they may be sustained through powerful symbolic language-and-identity associations, or both. When languages come into contact with one another, it is common to find that some are more dominant than others – in some or perhaps all social spheres – and this situation often leads to efforts towards the maintenance or even rejuvenation of weaker varieties. language and assimilation, language and conflict, language and contact, language and identity, language and instrumentality, language maintenance, language and migration, language and prescriptivism, language and prestige, language revival, language and status, language and symbolism

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.

This paper is another argument in favor of a uniformitarian approach to Creole languages, analyzed on a par with non-Creole languages. We take a critical look at competing hypotheses about the formation of Creole languages and any resulting typology. We document and analyze the shortcomings of these hypotheses in terms of methodical and theoretical flaws, lack of empirical coverage, and socio-historical implausibility. Then, we present our own proposal for a “Null Theory of Creole Formation” whereby the term “Creole” can only have socio-historical, and definitely not linguistic-structural, significance. In this “Null Theory,” the individual-level cognitive processes that underlie the formation of grammatical structures in Creole languages (via the acquisition of both native and non-native languages, by children and adults, respectively) are exactly on a par with their counterparts in the formation of non-Creole languages. So there isn’t, and couldn’t be, any sui generis “Creole typology.” We conclude with some guidelines toward a fully uniformitarian and theoretically constructive framework for the study of Creole languages and their formation – a framework that can also help us understand the formation of new language varieties that do not go by the label “Creole.”

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.

Mixed languages are a type of contact language that results from two or more languages combining in a situation of multilingualism. They arise during times of significant social change, serving as an expression of a new identity or the maintenance of an older identity. This chapter overviews languages which have been classified as “mixed languages” (§2) and presents case studies of a number of these languages within a typological classification: (i) Lexicon-Grammar (LG) mixed languages, where one language provides the grammar and another language contributes large amounts of vocabulary; (ii) structural mixes, where both languages contribute significant amounts of grammatical (and lexical) material to the new language; and (iii) converted languages, where a language maintains its lexicon but undergoes structural convergence with another language (§3). The chapter then discusses their contemporary functions (§4.1), their socio-historical origins (§4.2), and the linguistic processes (§5) that led to their genesis. Section 6 provides the first detailed discussion of the phonology of the mixed languages. As will be shown, the mixed languages originate from a range of socio-historical settings and linguistic processes that do not obviously predict the resultant shape of the language.