The 25 contributions of this volume represent a selection from the more than 120 papers originally presented at the International Conference on Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies (MIMS), held in Hamburg (October 2010) and organized by the Collaborative Research Center Multilingualism after twelve years of successful research. It presents a panorama of contemporary research in multilingualism covering three fields of investigation: (1) the simultaneous and successive acquisition of more than one language, including language attrition in multilingual settings, (2) historical...

Convergence, i.e. the increase of inter-systemic similarities, is usually considered the default development in language contact situations. This volume focuses on the other logical possibilities of diachronic development, namely stability and divergence - two well-attested, but under-researched phenomena. The contributions investigate the sociolinguistic and structural factors and mechanisms that lead to or at least reinforce both types of non-convergence, despite of language contact. The contributions cover a wide range of language contact situations, including standard and non-standard...