This chapter discusses – in the general problematics of languages in contact – Jewish languages and languages of the Diaspora. It intends to study from a comparative perspective especially the diachrony of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish, two diasporic languages with similar developments and destinies. After a short presentation of the two languages, we examine successively: 1) the creation of Judaeo-languages in Diaspora, 2) the Diaspora versus migration, 3) the Judaeo-calque languages, 4) the common dynamics of Jewish languages, and 5) the diachrony of Jewish languages. The conclusion focuses on the successful innovations appearing in a Jewish language. It points out the important role of the Hebrew component (its direct and indirect influence), as well as the broad interlinguistic competence of Yiddish and Judaeo-Spanish speakers in the process of evolution of the languages considered.

The Portuguese began their colonial expansion early in the fifteenth century: by 1417 they had arrived in Africa. They settled islands and coastal areas in Upper Guinea in Africa by 1462, islands in the Gulf of Guinea by 1500, reached India by 1510, Malaysia by 1516, Indonesia by the 1520s, and Macau by 1555. As colonization progressed, the Portuguese introduced one or more varieties of their language in their settlements and trading posts, and over time these varieties of Portuguese have evolved lexically and structurally. Spoken varieties of Portuguese in Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, and East Timor have developed different patterns that are often consistent with patterns found in naturalistic second language acquisition. They also display unmistakable evidence of substrate influence. In addition, many highly restructured varieties, the Portuguese-based creoles, developed throughout Portugal’s colonial empire, some of which are still spoken today in Africa and Asia. Apart from the substrate influence apparent in the creoles, they have also developed many features unique to them as independent linguistic systems. In this contribution, the expansion of Portugal’s colonial empire and the evolution of all these Portuguese varieties will be presented and discussed.

Language contact is at its most intense within one and the same individual. This chapter discusses the dynamic and multifaceted phenomenon of individual bilingualism, which emerges when individuals learn to understand multiple language varieties. Individual bilingual language use may contribute to societal processes of language change, language maintenance, and language loss. It is as yet not fully clear how bilingual individuals affect such larger processes, but cross-linguistic influence in comprehension and production, patterns of language choice, and variable levels of proficiency across the lifespan all play a role. These in turn depend on individuals' contexts for learning and using languages throughout the lifespan. The chapter exemplifies some of these on the basis of bilinguals' language biographies (including Frederick the Great's). Language learning histories and opportunities for using each language help explain the large variability in language skills and use among bilinguals. New languages can be learned until well into adulthood. Their number is constrained only by learning opportunities and motivation. Previously learned languages, including languages learned very early in life, can be lost through lack of use and practice. Language attitudes play a large role in all of this.

Medieval and classical periods in African history are a particular focus of this survey of language contact patterns seen on the African continent. The effects of languages associated with empires and kingdoms are shown to vary widely, with many such languages remaining influential even in the present day. Disentangling earlier patterns of language contact is a necessary step for those interested in reconstructing and classifying African languages. The great time depth and diversity found within each of the major African language phyla is mirrored by a dizzying array of contact patterns both within and across these phyla.

Origins of contact varieties are at the center of language contact research, focusing on the dynamics between the population structure’s social ecology and the linguistic phenomena that emerge. This chapter proposes an alternative hypothesis to the emergence of Andean Spanish, a macro-dialect spoken in several countries in western South America and product of contact between Spanish and Andean languages, particularly Quechua, the most spoken in the Americas. It argues that contrasts between the linguistic evidence present in colonial documents authored by Indigenous individuals and those present in the speech of Andean Spanish speakers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reveal different types of contact phenomena. The colonial data include linguistic evidence of lexical borrowing (primarily cultural) and grammatical phenomena proper of second language speakers (e.g., number and gender agreement, vocalic alternation). The post-colonial data include evidence of grammaticalization phenomena, revealing a case of contra-hierarchical grammatical influence (from the minoritized Indigenous language to the hegemonic language). The contrast between these two historical periods’ internal social ecologies reveals specific (types of) social conditions that help explain the focusing and emergence of the contact (macro-)dialect known as Andean Spanish.

Diaspora formation, like that of ethnic enclaves, is a process to be analyzed according to gender, generation, and social status given different spheres of communication and thus different linguistic registers. Children of migrants, in particular when attending school in the receiving society, form again different registers and, more than their parents, communicate with peers of the new majority language or of several languages. Linguistic métissage (“hybridization”) is a generational phenomenon. A functional analysis of “ethnic” elites indicates that clerics, journalists, and writers, in contrast to managers and mediators with the outside world, advocated language retention, since liturgies, literary writings, and culture-of-origin news may not easily be transposed into another language. Common people, on the other hand, in order to cope with challenges of their daily diasporic lives, needed quick rudimentary competence in the receiving country’s language. Language hybridization, in contrast to an established koine, involves a language of parental origin and a language of peer group and school socialization out of the context of parental cultural background and out of intense integration into the receiving society. Thus, diasporic language formation occurs in a process of merging and recontextualizing.

Andean linguistics has underestimated the role of states in the spreading of languages and dialectal fusion processes. This chapter deals with the spread of Quechua in the Inca and colonial eras. It first reconstructs the communicative functions performed by different varieties of this language in the Inca empire and brings to light the factors that determined the formation of koine varieties and their rapid diffusion. Mass migrations led by the Inca state have been the main factor in these processes of koineization. This chapter then shows how the colonial regime drastically intensified the centrifugal dynamics that have been exerted since the Inca era on the Andean communities, making the Spanish economic sphere (cities, mines, and haciendas) the focus of a new expansion and vernacularization of Quechua. Finally, it compares the historical-linguistic evolution of three Andean regions in colonial times (Ecuador, Central Peru and the Ayacucho region of Peru).

This chapter discusses how migration and trade as historical sociocultural processes have contributed to language spread and language contact situations in Latin America. It explores how language contact situations in Latin America have been dynamically created and changed by the movement of peoples and exchange of things and ideas through space and time, focusing on three kinds of linguistic outcomes: language spread, the emergence of multilingualism, and the development of contact languages. The discussion is framed by an interdisciplinary framework, focusing on the internal and external histories of indigenous languages of Latin America, from the initial peopling of the New World up to contemporary situations of language contact.

This chapter is a historical overview of the maintenance and loss of heritage languages in ten waves of India's diaspora spread over six continents. Various factors that contributed to language maintenance and loss at the community level are discussed. The social and political conditions in the new homelands have played a significant role in preserving and losing the heritage languages. While some diasporic communities have held on to their heritage languages for generations, most of them lost them rapidly after relocating from their motherland. Fascination for western cultures has played havoc on immigrant languages. This chapter's discussion goes beyond the oft-debated factor of “attitude” and digs a little deeper to suggest that the real-life need for the language is the primary cause of language use and retention. If the need is lacking or even vague, the language gradually disappears. A real need for a language seems to be at the root of preventing language loss in immigrant communities. Toward the end, the paper presents a model of language advancement, language maintenance, and language revitalization.

The chapter re-positions the study of contact-induced language change in the context of the individual user’s management of a complex repertoire of linguistic structures. Taking as a point of departure the assumption that for multilinguals, boundaries among “languages” are permeable and subject to users’ creativity, I draw links between structural outcomes of contact and the inherent functions that structural categories have in information processing in communication. Topics covered include code-switching, lexical borrowing, functional and grammatical borrowing, and convergence and contact-induced grammaticalization. I examine proposed hierarchies of borrowability in lexicon and grammar, and revisit the notion of “constraints” on borrowing. I argue in favour of an epistemology that identifies trends as worthy of attention even if isolated exceptions exist; and which seeks to derive explanatory models from such cross-linguistic trends. I conclude that the study of structural outcomes of language contact can contribute to a better understanding of the language faculty itself, and possibly even of key aspects of the evolution of human language.

Codeswitchingching, well known as a speech style in which bilinguals alternate languages between or within sentences, has recently been joined by a new term, translanguaging, which is widely used in bilingual education with a similar meaning. Among a variety of perspectives within the translanguaging literature, some scholars have adopted deconstructivism, the view that discrete languages and multilingualism do not actually exist. Deconstructivists see translanguaging as a theoretical alternative to codeswitching, as codeswitching implies internalized linguistic diversity. In this chapter, the author argues that the political use of language names (a concern of deconstructivists) can and should be distinguished from the social and structural idealizations used to study linguistic diversity, favoring what the author calls an Integrated Multilingual Model of bilingualism, contrasted with the Unitary and Dual Competence models. The author further distinguishes grammars from linguistic repertoires, arguing that bilinguals, like everybody, have a single linguistic repertoire but a richly diverse mental grammar, a viewpoint the author calls a multilingual perspective on translanguaging.

The Balkans were the first sprachbund (linguistic league, area, etc.) identified as a locus of contact-induced change owing to multi-lateral, multi-directional, mutual multilingualism to be identified as such. In this model, multilingualism is shared by speakers of the various languages, it is stable across generations, and it involves varied social groups. While no linguistic situation is unchanging, the combination of the factors mentioned here differentiates the sprachbund from other contact situations such as a diaspora, a colony, or that of endangered indigenous languages. Owing to the complexity of a sprachbund, the directionality of contact-induced change is not always discernible, nor is such directionality necessarily relevant, the point being the fact of convergence itself. This chapter defines the basic linguistic features relevant to the study of the Balkans as a linguistic area and also gives an overview of the linguistic study of the region. An important conclusion is the fact that the Balkan sprachbund continues to be a relevant lens through which language contact – both historical and ongoing – can be viewed.