There is increasing interest in the way that the size, composition, and environment of
populations influence the way that their languages evolve. There are two reasons why an …

The widespread Uralic family offers several advantages for tracing prehistory: a firm
absolute chronological anchor point in an ancient contact episode with well-dated Indo …

The Routledge Handbook of Language Contact provides an overview of the state of the art
of current research in contact linguistics. Presenting contact linguistics as an established …

The indigenous languages of the Northern Kimberley region of Western Australia comprise
a single genetic family (Worrorran), with three branches, and extensive multilingualism …

In today's global commerce and communication, linguistic diversity is in steady decline
across the world as speakers of smaller languages adopt dominant forms. While this …

This chapter singles out demography and socio-economic stratification as crucial factors in
determining language contact outcomes ranging from areal convergence in heteroglossic …

With more than seventy named languages, and many more locally distinctive varieties, the
Cameroonian Grassfields are known for their impressive linguistic diversity. At the same …

This book presents an account of how some key features of Proto-Germanic can be
explained as outcomes of contact-induced change. It proposes an alternative to previous …

Suriname represents an interesting case of unidirectional multilingual convergence in a
linguistic area. The multilingual ecology of Suriname is hierarchical. The Germanic …

Almost universally, diachronic sound patterns of languages reveal evidence of both regular
and irregular sound changes, yet an exception may be the languages of Australia. Here we …