To browse Academia. Beijing Shi, She hui ke xue wen xian chu ban she. Islams and modernities. London, Verso. Ta l king English phonetics across frontiers. Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars. The Farhang i Rashidi : a Persian dictionary. Piscataway, NJ, Gorgias Press. Hronek, et al. Praha, Leda. Bishkek, "Turar". Moskva, Knizhniki.
West Lafayette, Ind. Novosibirsk, Nauka. Moskva, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Nottingham England, Five Leaves. Prins, et al. Osaka, National Museum of Ethnology. This new volume on language contact and contact languages presents cutting-edge research by distinguished scholars in the field as well as by highly talented newcomers. It has two principal aims: to analyze language contact from different perspectives β notably those of language typology, diachronic linguistics, language acquisition and translation studies; and to describe, explain, and elaborate on universal constraints on language contact.
The individual chapters offer systematic comparisons of a wealth of contact situations and the book as a whole makes a valuable contribution to deepening our understanding of contact-induced language change. With its broad approach, this work will be welcomed by scholars of many different persuasions.
Both lay people and linguists use the concept of 'languages in contact' in a broad range of different, albeit related, ways. When William, Duke of Normandy, invades England in , he and his followers come speaking Norman French with a profound impact on English. But when 8-year old Christopher moves from Canada to England, his 'accent' changes in response to what he now hears around him.
In between these two extremes are situations that can all be called language contact. To make sense of the spectrum of language contact, we outline some major dimensions of that concept, and propose positioning research according to how the descriptions and explanations if any in the research treat these dimensions. To do this, we model language contact using the idea that language is the linguistic behavior of a community whose members communicate with one another. Then, we consider the different ways that contact between such communities can happen, and so develop a scheme for categorizing language contact.
