Description: Language contact - the linguistic and social outcomes of two or more languages coming into contact with each other - starts with the emergence of multilingual populations. Multilingualism involving plurilingualism can have various consequences beyond borrowing, interference, and code-mixing and -switching, including the emergence of lingua francas and new language varieties, as well as language endangerment and loss. Bringing together contributions from an international team of scholars, this Handbook - the second in a two-volume set - engages the reader with the manifold aspects of multilingualism and provides state-of-the-art research on the impact of population structure on language contact. It begins with an introduction that presents the history of the scholarship on the subject matter. The chapters then cover various processes and theoretical issues associated with multilingualism embedded in specific population structures worldwide as well as their outcomes. It is essential reading for anybody interested in how people behave linguistically in multilingual or multilectal settings.
Brief description: Salikoko S. Mufwene is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. His current research is on the phylogenetic emergence and speciation of languages, and on language vitality. His books include The Ecology of Language Evolution (CUP, 2001), Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America (2014), and Bridging Linguistics and Economics (CUP, 2020). He is the founding editor of Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact.
Review Quotes: 'In this two-volume Cambridge handbook, Mufwene and Escobar have assembled four dozen novel studies on linguistic change, as induced or conditioned by migration, language contact, multilingualism and population structure. This hefty new reference work provides an important resource on language change in the living context of human societies.' George van Driem, Chair of Historical Linguistics, University of Bern