“This volume represents a welcome addition to the literature on language contact, assembling contributions from international experts to offer an extensive resource which encompasses a broad range of language contact research.” (The Linguist List, 12 April 2014)
“Despite its century-long history, contact linguistics has received unprecedented attention in the past decades, and it is in this context that one must view the publication of ”The handbook of contact linguistics” (henceforth HLC), edited by Raymond Hickey for the Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics series. While a handbook is essentially a reference work aimed at introducing particular concepts for a given discipline, it is also, by its encompassing nature, an opportunity to capture the current state of that discipline and the directions in which it is moving.” (The Linguist, 6 January 2012)
“Excellent! Truly thorough coverage of all aspects and areas of language contact. This handbook surveys virtually everything known about the topic to date but also provides much new information and provocative thinking here for the first time. With 40 chapters written by the most stellar scholars in this field, this is an important book, not to be missed.”
—Lyle Campbell, University of Utah
“This latest addition to Blackwell’s authoritative Handbook series is an impressive achievement. The editor has assembled an outstanding team of contributors, who collectively provide a comprehensive and unparalleled survey of the field of language contact, covering both theoretical, conceptual and methodological issues and a wide range of case studies. It will be an invaluable resource for researchers and advanced students alike.”
—Patrick Stevenson, University of Southampton
From the Inside Flap
Language contact has an impact upon virtually all aspects of language change, and is increasingly a major topic of research within linguistics. The Handbook of Language Contact encompasses every area of language contact in a systematic and focused approach, and contains 40 specially commissioned essays by a team of globally renowned scholars who offer a wide-ranging exploration of the field. The volume contains numerous case studies from languages across the world, attesting to the variety and linguistic significance of this subject.
This authoritative handbook is accessibly structured into sections exploring the place of contact studies within linguistics as a whole; the value of contact studies for research into language change; and language contact in the context of work on language and society. The final section of the volume offers a representative cross-section of individual studies which reappraise the role of language contact in their respective contexts.
The Handbook is an essential reference for linguists working in the fields of language contact and change, language theory, sociolinguistics, and bilingualism.
From the Back Cover
Language contact has an impact upon virtually all aspects of language change, and is increasingly a major topic of research within linguistics. The Handbook of Language Contact encompasses every area of language contact in a systematic and focused approach, and contains 40 specially commissioned essays by a team of globally renowned scholars who offer a wide-ranging exploration of the field. The volume contains numerous case studies from languages across the world, attesting to the variety and linguistic significance of this subject.
This authoritative handbook is accessibly structured into sections exploring the place of contact studies within linguistics as a whole; the value of contact studies for research into language change; and language contact in the context of work on language and society. The final section of the volume offers a representative cross-section of individual studies which reappraise the role of language contact in their respective contexts.
The Handbook is an essential reference for linguists working in the fields of language contact and change, language theory, sociolinguistics, and bilingualism.
About the Author
Raymond Hickey is Professor of Linguistics at Essen University, Germany. His main areas of research are varieties of English (especially Irish English) and general questions of language contact, shift, and change as well as computer corpus processing. He has published widely, the most recent titles being A Sound Atlas of Irish English (2004), Legacies of Colonial English (2004), Dublin English: Evolution and Change (2005), Irish English: History and Present-Day Forms (2007), and Eighteenth-Century English: Ideology and Change (2010). He has also published over 80 articles on various issues within linguistics and produced an electronic corpus of Irish English.
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