This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the verbal-guise technique (henceforth VGT), a variant of the speaker evaluation paradigm in which guises representing different language varieties are produced by different speakers, each speaking in their habitual language variety. First, key features of the VGT are discussed. Second, a brief historical sketch of the technique’s introduction, development, and proliferation in language attitudes research is offered. Third, key advantages (e.g. speaker authenticity, ease of implementation) and disadvantages (e.g. lack of full experimental control) of the technique are reviewed. Fourth, various practical considerations surrounding research planning and design are described and several recommendations are offered, including: (a) matching speakers on various demographic factors (e.g. sex, age), (b) matching speakers on extraneous vocal characteristics not of interest in the study (e.g. pitch), and (c) using multiple speakers to represent each variety of interest. Fifth, the main concerns surrounding the analysis and interpretation of data obtained using the VGT are discussed. Finally, a brief sketch is provided of the methodological considerations that were involved in designing a recent study utilising the VGT, which examined Americans’ attitudes toward standard American English and nine foreign accents: Arabic, Farsi, French, German, Hindi, Hispanic, Mandarin, Russian, and Vietnamese.

In this chapter we discuss case studies from research on Arabic which employed various methods of social stratification. These include class-based socio-economic stratification, social network analysis, regionality, life-mode, and the community of practice construct.

The introductory chapter is a succinct overview of the principles and approaches to variation in Arabic as followed in the book. It also defines the scope of coverage. It briefly explains the historical connection between sociolinguistics and dialectology, advocating an empirically based approach to analysing variation in spoken Arabic.

This chapter discusses research methods in the field of perceptual dialectology, which aims to uncover non-linguists’ beliefs, thoughts, and perceptions about dialect variation. The chapter details the historical development of contemporary approaches to perceptual dialectology, including a discussion of folk linguistics. Perceptual dialectology methods rely to a large extent on allowing respondents to provide freely given data, without providing too many constraints. Whilst this is a strength of the approach as it allows researchers to challenge their assumptions and biases, it can produce ‘messy’ data that is difficult to process. The development of a suite of methods to investigate dialect perception is examined, including the draw-a-map task, voice placement, and voice reactions tasks (including which features listeners might pay attention to as they hear speakers), along with ratings tasks and those that deal with interview data. Practical considerations in the application of perceptual dialectology methods are addressed with a focus on the type(s) of data such methods generate. For example, the chapter discusses using GIS software for processing draw-a-map data. The chapter uses perception data of English dialect variation in Great Britain to demonstrate the power of the draw-a-map method also for understanding broader questions about the nature of perception.

This chapter presents an overview of the main lingua francas of the world. The theoretical framework is Ecosystemic Linguistics, a branch of Ecolinguistics which sees language as communication or communicative interaction, not primarily as a system. The system does exist, but in order to facilitate understanding. It is shown that lingua francas such as Swahili, Fanakalo, Lingala, Kituba, and Sango (in Africa), Chinook Jargon, Mobilian Jargon, Nahuatl, Lingua Geral/Nheengatu, and Quechua (in the Americas), and Malay and Filipino (in Asia), among others, confirm this view of language. They are mainly used in situations of contact between speakers of mutually unintelligible languages, in which case the main concern is with mutual understanding, not with the construction of grammatical sentences. It is also shown that one of the main causes of the emergence of lingua francas is colonization.

This chapter generally deals with the borrowing of lexical items from English into varieties of North American oral French. First, the socio-historic context of English–French language contact in North America from the late eighteenth century to the present is described. Current demographics on French spoken at home in North America are then provided. An extensive review of the quantitative research on lexical borrowing in oral French in North America follows: the Eastern Townships of Quebec, the Ottawa-Gatineau region, on the border of Quebec and Ontario, Nova Scotia, the case of Chiac in New Brunswick, the community of Hearst in northern Ontario, French in Massachusetts and in Louisiana. In conclusion, the article attempts to compare a number of borrowing features in the communities studied, such as rate of lexical borrowing, grammatical category preference in borrowing, degree of morphological, syntactic and phonological integration, etc.

This paper synthesizes evidence for the origin and spread of the Indo-European languages from three disciplines – genomic research, archaeology, and, especially, linguistics – to reassess the validity of the Anatolian and Steppe Hypotheses. Research on ancient DNA reveals a massive migration off the steppe c. 2500 BCE, providing exceptionally strong support for the Steppe hypothesis. However, intriguing questions remain, such as why ancient Greek and Indo-Iranian populations had a smaller proportion of steppe ancestry, and Anatolian apparently had none at all. Lexical and archaeological evidence for wheels and looms provides essential clues about the early separation of Anatolian from the Indo-European community and the late entrance of Greek into the Aegean area. Evidence from the morphologies of the Indo-European languages supports these findings: the morphological patterns of the Anatolian languages show clear archaism, implying earlier separation, while the morphologies of Indo-Iranian and Greek display an array of similarities pointing to relatively late areal contact. Both the lexical and the morphological evidence, then, alongside the genomic and archaeological record, suggests that the Steppe hypothesis offers a preferable solution. Ultimately, these conclusions demonstrate the need for more dynamic models of change, including considerations of contact, stratification, and cross-disciplinary approaches.

There are a few hundred known sign languages around the world, and in such language communities, multilingualism is the norm. This multilingualism traverses modalities: signed, written, and, in some cases, spoken forms of language. Such a linguistic landscape inevitably leads to various forms of language contact between languages, including contact between two or more signed languages (characterised by lexical borrowing), signed language and spoken language (characterised by mouthings), and signed language and written language (characterised by fingerspelling, initialized fingerspelling). This chapter also covers sign language interference, code switching and code mixing, and the concept of bimodal bilingualism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of pidginization and creolization of sign languages and sign language endangerment, as well as general comments on the characteristics of contact between signed languages.

This chapter is about the evolution of language contact as a research area from the late nineteenth century to the present. It underscores the catalyst part that the discovery of creoles and pidgins by European philologists and other precursors of modern linguistics played in highlighting the roles of population movement and language contact as actuators of language change and speciation. It draws attention to the significance of the study of language evolution in European colonies in making evident the realities of language coexistence. These include the possible competition that can cause language shift and the death of one or some of the coexistent languages, a process that has affected competing European vernaculars faster than it has, for instance, Native American languages. It underscores the expansion of the field as linguists became interested in phenomena such as interference, codeswitching (or translanguaging), codemixing, diglossia, language diasporas, and linguistic areas, as well as factors that facilitate or favor the evolution of structures, sometimes of the same language, in divergent ways, owing to changes in population structures.

The evolution of the Romance languages from Latin was significantly shaped by the numerous language contact environments, which resulted from conquest, colonization, and trade. This chapter traces the development of the largest Romance languages throughout Europe, with emphasis on the known or postulated effects of language contact. The chapter continues with an account of the spread of Spanish, Portuguese, and French to the Americas, together with the ensuing contacts with indigenous languages and languages of voluntary and involuntary immigration and the formation of Afro-Romance creole languages.

Language contact studies and historical linguistics, i.e. the study of language change, are subfields of linguistics that have long been recognized as being mutually relevant. This chapter explores this relationship along two dimensions: first, with regard to the fields of study themselves, and second, and perhaps more importantly, with regard to those aspects of language contact and of influence external to a given linguistic system that are particularly relevant to understanding the basic subject matter of historical linguistics, i.e. what happens to languages as they pass through time. In terms of the fields of study, an overview of the historiography of the distinction between internally motivated and externally motivated change is offered. This survey is followed by a discussion of several case studies, in which language contact serves as an actuator of change as well as some in which it is an inhibitor of change. Finally, the interaction of language contact with another key issue in historical linguistics, namely language genealogy, is discussed, along with a consideration of the naturalness and pervasiveness of language contact.