Language Contact in Times of Globalization

Book excerpt: Language contact phenomena have been researched throughout the history of the discipline, but the intensity of the research has undoubtedly risen during the last decades due to growing globalization. This peer-reviewed volume presents twelve papers from the Second Conference on Language Contact in Times of Globalization (University of Groningen, June 2009) which deal with a wide range of topics, languages and contact situations. Five of them involve a Finno-Ugric language (Saami-Komi-Russian; Finnic-Baltic; Mordvin-Turkic; Estonian-German; Saami general), two a Slavic language (Slavic-Romance; Slavic general), two Germanic-Romance contact and three situations outside Europe (The Arabic World; Central Asia; South America). Methods range from field research and corpus analysis to historical linguistics, and both synchronic and diachronic approaches are used. The authors are Rogier Blokland and Michael Rießler, Martine Bruil, Louise-Amélie Cougnon, Anissa Daoudi, Santeri Junttila, Janneke Kalsbeek, Folke Müller and Susan Schlotthauer, Johanna Nichols, Pekka Sammallahti, Peter Schrijver, Remco van Pareren, and Willem Vermeer. Keywords / target groups: General linguistics, Contact linguistics, Finno-Ugric linguistics, Slavic linguistics.