The Interplay of Variation and Change in Contact Settings

This volume is at cross-roads between two research traditions dealing with language change: contact linguistics and language variation and change. It departs from the consideration that linguistic variation is still an opaque area for most contact-induced language change studies. Intending to fill this gap, it offers a rich panorama of case studies and approaches dealing with linguistic variation in contact settings. It concentrates both at monolingual data, tracing variation and contact beneath surface homogeneity and at apparent heterogeneity, such as code-switching, or multilingual data showing variation, and traces their underlying regularities. It shows the relationship between variation and change in language contact settings