The handbook of language contact is the latest addition to the impressive set of “Blackwell handbooks in linguistics.” The volume is divided into four parts with forty articles in total. Part 1, “Contact and linguistics” (six chapters), locates the study of language contact vis à vis central topics in general linguistics: language change and historical linguistics (including quantitative and computational approaches), language classification, typology, grammaticalization, and grammatical theory. Part 2, “Contact and change” (six chapters), looks at a range of possible outcomes and consequences of language contact: language shift, borrowing, code-switching, dialect contact and change, the emergence of new varieties, and pidgin/creole languages. Part 3, “Contact and society” (five chapters), includes diverse topics such as fieldwork issues, ethnicity, “scenarios” and “typologies,” as well as a chapter on language death (see below for a more detailed disscussion of the chapters in Part 3).
The largest section is Part 4, which provides the reader with a range of case studies of language contact (twenty-three chapters). The first chapter, by Johanna Nichols, provides a useful overview of language contact with respect to macrofamilies and macroareas. It is followed by chapters on contact in the prehistory of Indoeuropean (Theo Vennemann), and the Germanic languages (Paul Roberge). Moving from macrofamilies to individual languages, the following five chapters focus on the history of English in various localities (United Kingdom/early history, United States, Caribbean, Asia, and Africa). While English thus receives quite detailed coverage, the same cannot be said for the remaining 6,000 or so languages of the world, which are discussed mainly in terms of macrofamilies (Celtic, Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, North American languages, Siberian languages, Chinese languages, and Australian indigenous languages). Spanish and Portuguese share one article (John Lipski); Arabic has its own entry (Kees Versteegh). In terms of geographical areas there are individual chapters on the Balkans, Africa, South Asia, New Guinea, and the Pacific. The relative overrepresentation of English among the case studies is a reflection of the very real inequalities between languages and their study (Hymes Reference Hymes1973). Thus, as a linguist located in Africa, I am deeply concerned that the complexity of this continent with at least four macrofamilies (Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan) and more than 2,000 languages, many of which are severely endangered, is discussed in just one chapter (by Tucker Childs, Ch. 34). The chapter itself opens with an acknowledgement of “the immense variety of language contact situations on the African continent” and laments the fact that contact in Africa remains “widely under-researched” (695). And certainly, the topics discussed in Ch. 34 could have been expanded into important contributions in their own right: Atlantic and Mande, pidgins and creoles in Africa, and urban varieties of African languages, including not only restructured forms (e.g. Town Bemba in Zambia), but also highly multilingual youth languages such as Iscamtho in South Africa, Sheng in Kenya, and Camfranglais in Cameroon. I assume that colleagues from Asia or the Americas would voice similar concerns. (South American indigenous languages, for example, do not have a separate chapter and are discussed in terms of macrofamilies by Nichols as well as in Lipski's chapter on Spanish and Portuguese.) Future work—our own and that of our students—must work towards bridging these gaps.
Reviewing a volume of over 800 pages is necessarily selective. The remainder of this review focuses on my own area of expertise (and teaching), namely the intersection of language contact studies and sociolinguistics. In terms of the organization of the volume, Part 3, “Contact and Society,” appears to be the section dedicated to sociolinguistics. Yet, upon closer reading I was puzzled by the chapters that were included under this heading. Ch.13 by Pieter Muysken looks at what he calls “scenarios” of language contact, and offers a typological approach to different language-contact situations. Muysken's scenarios are described on the basis of four features: frequency of occurence, symmetry configuration, features involved, and constraints. Of these only symmetry configuration (constellation of language dominance/subordination) can be described as being (weakly) sociolinguistic. Moreover, Muysken draws explict attention to the importance of psycholinguistic dimensions of language contact, which are essential for understanding its operations at the level of individual speakers. And indeed a chapter on the psycholinguistics of language contact would have been a welcome addition to the volume. (However, the interested reader can refer to Blackwell's Handbook of bilingualism, which provides quite extensive coverage of this dimension.) Trudgill's Ch. 15 picks up on the importance of psycholinguistics. He distinguishes two distinct learning and acquisition contexts in high contact situations: (a) adult and postadolescent language learning, which draws on universal processes of second language acquisition (postcritical threshold contact scenarios), and (b) childhood bilingualism (precritical threshold contact scenarios). This dichotomy is similar to Thomason's (Reference Thomason2001) distinction between shift-induced interference versus community bilingualism. The former, according to Trudgill, leads to processes of structural simplification, the latter to (additive) complexification of the linguistic system. Both chapters (Muysken and Trudgill) would, in my view, have been better placed under “Contact and change;” their engagement with sociolinguistic concerns in the sense of “society” is minimal, and their focus is more strongly structural and, in the case of Trudgill, explicitly psycholinguistic.
Ch. 14 by Carmen Fought, by contrast, fits squarely into a sociolinguistic section. The chapter looks at ethnic identity and language contact and provides an excellent and well-written discussion of variety—rather than language—contact in the US (i.e. varieties of English). Her discussion shows that contact alone is not enough for convergence to occur, but that group boundaries (and perceptions thereof) are central. However, the question remains as to whether we can generalize from variety contact to language contact, especially in contexts where the languages involved are typologically distinct. Fought's chapter is followed by a skillful chapter on language death by Suzanne Romaine, and a discussion of fieldwork issues in language contact situations by Claire Bowern. The latter chapter provides a comprehensive discussion of language documentation under conditions of language contact and will be extremely useful for graduate students preparing for the field. However, given the title of Part 3, I would again raise mild concerns regarding a lack of sociolinguistic orientation: Bowern focuses squarely—and importantly—on language documentation via various forms of elicitation, and the chapter does not discuss other approaches to fieldwork. For example, what does language contact mean for the sociolinguistic (Labovian) study of variation? How should we approach the sociolinguistic interview in multilingual contexts? How does language contact (with or without diglossia) affect our ability to identify “the vernacular” in our data? (For discussion of some of these issues see the papers in Stanford & Preston Reference Stanford and Dennis2009.) Contact also affects ethnographic fieldwork that takes a broader sociocultural perspective. How should we deal with questions of genre in multilingual communities? What types of speakers are we likely to encounter in such contexts with respect to repertoire organization? What languages should be used in qualitative data collection on, for example, linguistic ideologies if the community in question is bilingual (i.e. does data need to be elicited in both languages to ensure accuracy, as suggested, for example, by Pavlenko Reference Pavlenko2007)? An additional chapter considering sociolinguistic fieldwork would have been useful.
These comments on the organization and coverage of Part 3, however, do not mean that sociolinguistic concerns are underrepresented in the volume as a whole: many of the case studies draw on issues of sociolinguistics, and Chs. 9, 10, and 11—grouped under “Contact and change”—express a strongly sociolinguistic orientation in their argument and data: Penelope Gardner-Chloros on code-switching, David Britain on dialect contact, and Paul Kerswill on new varieties (including ethnolects).
Overall, the volume offers extensive coverage of well-established topics in language contact, and will be an extremely useful reference for anyone working in the area. All authors are top scholars in their subfields and their chapters cover a wide range of theoretical, conceptual, and methodological issues—from language history to grammaticalization, from linguistic areas and typology to pidgin/creole languages—with great sophistication. There are some cases where I would disagree with the interpretation of data and contact scenarios that I am familiar with, but such disagreements are the bread and butter of scholarly debate and to be welcomed.
The volume is located firmly within mainstream linguistics, and recent challenges from those advocating a more poststructuralist approach to language are mentioned only in passing. For example, Ben Rampton's work on language crossing is discussed only briefly in Fought's chapter and not listed in the index. A poststructuralist perspective on language contact would also include Makoni & Pennycook's (Reference Makoni and Pennycook2006) work on disinventing languages, Blommaert's (Reference Blommaert2010) sociolinguistics of globalization, Creese & Blackledge's (Reference Creese and Blackledge2009) discussion of translanguaging, Backhus (Reference Backhaus2006) and other's work on linguistic landscaping, and Bailey's (Reference Bailey and Heller2007) approach to code-switching as a form of Bakthinian heteroglossia. This, however, would probably need a separate volume. Hickey has certainly done an excellent job in establishing a base line for future research and discussions by bringing together a wide range of studies focusing on the structural consequences of language contact, that is, on contact explanations of linguistic form.
