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Forthcoming: Foundations of language contact: A comparative survey
Synopsis
This volume analyzes the social foundations of language contact from a typological perspective. The chapters describe 13 contact situations across the world, focusing on contact between pairs of communities that speak unrelated languages. Many of the situations concern current or recent contact, but some focus on historical contact.
The general introduction of the volume presents the wider context of the volume, its methodology, and discusses pertinent issues emerging in research on the social foundations of language contact, such as data sensitivity. The contact situations in the individual chapters are described with a unified methodology that probes language contact in six social domains, namely, trade, family and kin, local community, labour, knowledge, and social exchange. The individual chapters describe the sociolinguistic and sociohistorical aspects of the language contact situations, written by descriptive linguists, sociolinguists, or anthropologists who are specialists on the contact situations. Together, the chapters document the social foundations of contact in the selected multilingual situations, of which many involve minority languages, and provide a model for further research in this field.
The book is mainly intended for sociolinguists, experts on multilingualism, historical linguists, (linguistic) anthropologists, and typologists as well as researchers interested in language contact in general. Our hope is that this volume will foster more research on describing and reconstructing the sociolinguistic settings of contact situations, in collaboration with linguists, historians, anthropologists, and researchers in other related fields.
Chapters
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Exploring contact in Rangi- and Alagwa-speaking communities
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The sociolinguistic history of Tjwao
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The effects of cross-border and internal contacts on the Maltese languageFrom Sicilian and Italian to English
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Sibe and Uighur in north-western China
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Nen and Idi of Southern New Guinea
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Burarra and Yolngu Matha of Arnhem Land (northern Australia)
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Mawng and Kunbarlang of western Arnhem Land (Australia)
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A history of contact between the Kwoma and Manambu
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The Alorese and the Adang in eastern Indonesia
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Otomi and Spanish of Central Mexico
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Western Toba and Wichí Social Contact
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Chipaya and Aymara
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Toba-Qom and Spanish contact in three (semi)urban communities of Argentina