Language Contact: An Introduction - Paperback

by Sarah Thomason (Author)

Surveying situations in which language contact arises, Sarah G. Thomason focuses on what happens to the languages themselves: sometimes nothing, sometimes the incorporation of new words, sometimes the spread of new sounds and sentence structures across many languages and wide swathes of territory. She outlines the origins and results of contact-induced language change, extreme language mixture - which can produce pidgins, creoles, and bilingual mixed languages - and language death. The book concludes with a brief survey of language endangerment.

Author Biography

Sarah G. Thomason is professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan.