Diaspora Language Contact: The Speech of Croatian Speakers Abroad - Paperback

by Jim Hlavac (Editor), Diana Stolac (Editor), Sarah Thomason (Preface by)

This book is an innovative contribution to contact linguistics as it presents a rarely studied but sizeable diaspora language community in contact with five languages - English, German, Italian, Norwegian and Spanish - across four continents. Foregrounded by diachronic descriptions of heritage Croatian in long-standing minority communities the book presents synchronically based studies of the speech of different generations of diaspora speakers. Croatian offers excellent scope as a base language to examine how lexical and morpho-structural innovations occur in a highly inflective Slavic language where external influence from Germanic and Romance languages appears evident. The possibility of internal factors is also addressed and interpretive models of language change are drawn on.

With a foreword by Sarah Thomason, University of Michigan

Author Biography

Jim Hlavac, Monash University, Australia; Diana Stolac, University of Rijeka, Croatia.