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This volume provides a collection of research reports on multilingualism and language contact ranging from Romance, to Germanic, Greco and Slavic languages in situations of contact and diaspora. Most of the contributions are empirically-oriented studies presenting first-hand data based on original fieldwork, and a few focus directly on the methodological issues in such research. Owing to the multifaceted nature of contact and diaspora phenomena (e.g. the intrinsic transnational essence of contact and diaspora, and the associated interplay between majority and minoritized languages and multilingual practices in different contact settings, contact-induced language change, and issues relating to convergence) the disciplinary scope is broad, and includes ethnography, qualitative and quantitative sociolinguistics, formal linguistics, descriptive linguistics, contact linguistics, historical linguistics, and language acquisition. Case studies are drawn from Italo-Romance varieties in the Americas, Spanish-Nahuatl contact, Castellano Andino, Greko/Griko in Southern Italy, Yiddish in Anglophone communities, Frisian in the Netherlands, Wymysiöry¿ in Poland, Sorbian in Germany, and Pomeranian and Zeelandic Flemish in Brazil.
About the author
Andrew Nevins is Professor of Language Sciences at University College London. He has conducted research on the contribution of minoritized languages to linguistic theory, with work ranging from from Zazaki Kurdish to Maxakalí Sign Language, across domains such as phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, and is involved with the training of new generations of researchers in methods of experimentally-based data collection, including through a currently Leverhulme-funded research project on Southern Bantu. He is the author of Locality in Vowel Harmony (2010, MIT Press) and co-author of Morphotactics: The Structure of Spellout and Basque Auxiliaries (2012, Springer).
