More than forty years ago it was demonstrated that the African continent can be divided into four distinct language families. Research on African languages has accordingly been preoccupied with reconstructing and understanding similarities across these families. This has meant that an interest in other kinds of linguistic relationship, such as whether structural similarities and dissimilarities among African languages are the result of contact between these languages, has never been the subject of major research. This book shows that such similarities across African languages are more common...

This book revisits and updates the concept of linguistic ecology, outlining applications to a variety of contact situations worldwide.

This book traces the spread of the perfect tense across Europe, demonstrating the crucial role of language contact.

This book is about the contact of English with diverse languages and cultures, and its concurrent indigenization and speciation.

This volume presents a historical-sociolinguistic description and analysis of Maritime Polynesian Pidgin.