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.

This chapter traces the expansion of English from its beginnings to its present-day global role. Viewed from a geographical perspective, settlement moves and colonization have re-rooted the English language to different continents and countries, producing distinct contact types. We outline these developments from their historical and demographic perspectives as well as with respect to linguistic contact conditions for North America (including African American English), Southern Hemisphere varieties (Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa), and second-language postcolonial Englishes in Africa and Asia. In addition, it is shown how recent, vibrant processes have established new forms of English in new contexts, including non-postcolonial countries, lingua franca uses, and in cyberspace, thus producing radically new contact ecologies. Contact scenarios in these processes have involved dialect contact between native speakers from different regions, the process of structural nativization based on local feature pools, various degrees of restructuring and creole formation, and the genesis of hybrid varieties and innovative multilingual settings. We outline theoretical approaches to grasp these processes, including the Dynamic Model of the evolution of postcolonial Englishes, the Extra- and Intra-territorial Forces Model, and the postulate of different types of “nativeness.”

Urban contact dialects emerged in urban settings among locally born young people and can serve as markers of a new, multiethnic urban identity. The chapter brings together instances of such dialects from Europe and Africa, two regions where these phenomena have received a lot of attention from contact-linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. In both settings, local contexts for urban contact dialects are characterised by an openness to multilingual practices. In African contexts, this multilingual perspective is usually also present at the macro level of the larger society; in Europe, the societal context is generally characterized by a more monolingual (and monoethnic) habitus. The comparative perspective adopted here shows that these differences in macro context support different structural and sociolinguistic outcomes, including contact-induced and contact-facilitated change; urban contact dialects taking the form of multilingual mixed languages or new vernaculars of a national majority language; the possible spread of these dialects to become general markers of youth or modernity; and negative public perceptions involving different language-ideological patterns.

The Chinese diaspora comprises sizeable ethnic Chinese populations spread across the globe. Although Chinese diasporic communities share a common heritage and, by definition, a common heritage language, their sociolinguistic backgrounds and identities are diverse, complex, and multifaceted. Members of the diaspora speak one or more, or indeed none, of several mutually unintelligible Chinese varieties and dialects. Recent changes in the demographics of the overseas Chinese communities have, moreover, led to new patterns of multilingualism. This chapter discusses key sociolinguistic aspects of language contact relevant to this group at large, including language maintenance versus language loss, the trends and challenges of heritage language learning, the role of Chinese community schools, differences in attitudes towards Chinese dialects, and the dynamics of multilingual identities and multilingual practices such as translanguaging and language brokering. The review focuses on the diasporic communities in Anglophone and other Western settings, as it is mainly the rising numbers of ethnic Chinese in those parts of the world that have fuelled the growing interest in Chinese heritage language learning and research in recent decades.

Several conditions of the Korean diaspora offer unique opportunities for the study of language contact. These include the diverse routes and sites of migration that have defined the movement of overseas Koreans throughout the past century; the relatively strong linguistic and cultural homogeneity of Korean society and the prominent role that the Korean language plays as an index of Korean identity; and the recent shift from long-term migration towards flexible, short-term migration that characterizes the Korean diaspora today. This chapter addresses these issues through a survey of the history and sociolinguistic conditions of the Korean diaspora. After an overview of the Korean diaspora’s historical and geographical context, it considers the general trends of language maintenance and attrition in various Korean communities around the world. It also considers how language ideology serves as an important condition for the language maintenance of diasporic Koreans, as well as the more recent rise of flexible migration and shifting linguistic practice in the Korean diaspora.

In this chapter, I provide a historical and linguistic account of the ways in which French was introduced and spread to some parts of the African continent and then diversified along a basilect-to-acrolect continuum. I show the different communicative functions it plays in the new ecologies where it evolved. In environments where major African languages are used as vehicular languages, French enjoys limited communicative functions, mainly restricted to formal interactions such as in school, public administration, and government. Conversely, in ecologies where no indigenous lingua franca had emerged, it is used in daily interactions to communicate across ethnolinguistic groups. I then address the questions of why schooling hasn’t contributed to the spread of French in the post-colonial era despite the significant increase of the school population and why it has not speciated into different regional varieties drastically different from those of the former metropoles (viz., France and Belgium). Finally, I present contrastive examples of Camfranglais/Francanglais (Cameroun) and Nouchi (Côte d’Ivoire) and argue that the latter may be the only variety that has speciated into a new one very different from that of France.

Linguists usually study the consequences of the sixteenth-century invasion of Mexico and the Caribbean by Castile through the constructs of the language (Nahuatl, Spanish, Yoruba, etc.) and the dialectitalic (Old Castilian, Andalusian, New World koine, pluridialectalism, etc.) and in terms of the contactitalic between these constructs. In contrast, contact is studied here at the level of individual speakers whose inventories of lexical and structural features change and evolve, as new features from other speakers are differentially acquired. These disaggregated processes crucially involve inter-speaker and intra-speaker variation dependent in part on the different frequencies of lexical exemplars. We stress the socially invented nature of named communal languages and argue that our focus on variable contact between idiolects and the disaggregated conception of lexical exemplars can overcome theoretical limitations that are unavoidable when contact is seen in terms of languages and dialects. The data come primarily from the well-documented history of Castilian /s/ in so-called loan phonology in sixteenth-century New Spain, supplemented by a secondary look at nineteenth-century Cuba.

Five-hundred years ago, Europeans finally “discovered” Malay, the undisputed language of Southeast Asian commerce and diplomacy of that time. In this chapter, we look into the role of Malay in the early modern era so we can understand the processes that have contributed to its continued diffusion and diversification in this century. We look at the spread of Malay, not by mass migration, but through language convergence and language shift. Malay, whether a national language (named Malay and Indonesian) or a local dialect spoken by a small ethnic minority, is one of the world’s major languages. Its geographic and demographic expansion can be linked to numerous factors, among them: language shift as a component of broader cultural change; consolidation of diverse ethnicities; immigrant accommodation to the majority population; and early use in national educational systems. But the underlying basis and strength of Malay is its centuries old geographic and societal diffusion. On the one hand, its national-language status has triggered the significant growth we are witnessing now. On the other hand, the creativity of its speakers using diverse social and regional dialects sustains that growth, reflected in its large profile in today’s electronic media, such as Facebook.

The discussion of language contact has paid increased attention to non-European pidgins for their linguistic and sociohistorical significance. Drechsel offers an in-depth comparative-contrastive analysis of two better documented cases: Mobilian Jargon of the lower Mississippi River valley and Maritime Polynesian Pidgin of the eastern Pacific. Beyond observable differences in function and form, this contrast, drawing on broad sociolinguistic-sociohistorical descriptions, recognizes major parallels in an initial typological scheme of non-European language contact: an analytic morpho-syntactic structure of both pidgins, indigenous paramount chiefdoms (including the incorporation of neighboring communities and contacts with distant peoples, be they with other native peoples or Europeans, by canoe on rivers or sailing at sea) and the fur trade as major sociolinguistic contexts (with the fur trade extending into the eastern Pacific as part of the early American trade with China). In a postscript, the contrast of Mobilian Jargon and Maritime Polynesian Pidgin raises an old historical question often neglected in the Anglophile literature: What was the sociolinguistic role of the Spaniards in the trans-Pacific galleon trade of American silver for Chinese silk, other textiles, and luxuries between Mexico and China from 1571 until 1815?

In this chapter the author addresses the following questions: What does it mean to say that a language is a creole? Do creoles constitute a separate global typological class apart from other language typological groupings? The author calls for research on creole languages that is free from linguistic feature bias, creole language list bias, and genealogical bias. He compares expansion languages from the Meso and South American indigenous language families, particularly the Quechuan family (focusing on Ecuador, the northern border), with the Arawakan, Tupian, Cariban, Jêan, Chibchan, Uto-Aztecan, Mayan, and Otomanguean families. The comparison highlights processes of ethnogenesis, morphological reduction, and sub- or adstrate influence. The findings help broaden the definition of “creole” to refer to a special lexifier– descendant relationship, making the notion of creole a relational one, to facilitate comparisons with other languages and with “linguistic areas.” Questions that remain include: Are there area-specific features? And can this approach shed light on the characterization of creoles as a particular group of languages? What role can language contact play in reconstructing language families?

In this chapter the author revisits the concept of “super-diversity” from the perspective of colonial history. He presents the phenomenon as the outcome of the reversal of migrations, this time from especially the European former exploitation colonies to the European metropoles since the wake of World War II. The opposite direction of migrations had prevailed before, ignoring those of non-European enslaved and contract laborers from trade and exploitation colonies to settlement and other colonies. The author highlights differences in political and economic power associated with the differing directions of migrations, with the Europeans always having the upper hand, including in how to identify the migrants. Differences include the superposition of European languages as High varieties, associated with new communicative domains, over indigenous ones in the (trade and) exploitation colonies. This is in contrast with the marginalization and resentment of “allochthonous” languages in European urban centers, in addition to the stigmatization of the xenolectal and mixed character of the “autochthonous” language varieties produced by the migrants. The label “super-diversity” appears to reflect this fear of the foreigners from the colonies. Otherwise, the increase in societal multilingualism is not new. “Super-diversity” indexes the Othering of the immigrants.

Originating from its relatively tiny native speaking population on the narrow East African coastal strip and its adjacent islands, the Swahili language today has spread throughout East and Central Africa to become the most widely spoken African language after Arabic. This chapter explores the various forces – trade, religion, education, wars, and urbanization – that have led to this momentous linguistic expansion over the years. In the process, the language came in contact with a number of other languages – of international traders and invaders like the Arabs and the Portuguese, of settler communities of Indian and Arabic descent, and of a broad range of African ethnic groups inland – that resulted in the emergence of new varieties of the language. In conclusion, the chapter will look at how, through the different spaces and contexts of linguistic contact, Swahili came to impact on other languages of East and Central Africa.