Global and local perspectives on language contact

This edited volume pays tribute to traditional and innovative language contact research, bringing together contributors with expertise on different languages examining general phenomena of language contact and specific linguistic features which arise in language contact scenarios. A particular focus lies on contact between languages of unbalanced political and symbolic power, language contact and group identity, and the linguistic and societal implications of language contact settings, especially considering contemporary global migration streams. Drawing on various methodological approaches, among others, corpus and contrastive linguistics, linguistic landscapes, sociolinguistic interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, the contributions describe phenomena of language contact between and with Romance languages, Semitic languages, and English(es).

Katrin Pfadenhauer is a postdoctoral research associate at the Department of Romance Linguistics at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her main research interests are language contact (especially in Mexico and the Caribbean), grammaticalization and language change, unguided second language acquisition, creole languages, and Spanish in Latin America. As part of her dissertation (2012) on the Spanish-Mixtec language contact, she conducted intensive field research in Mexico (as a visiting scholar at CIESAS, Mexico City, funded by the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores de México). She has been to Haiti and the Dominican Republic several times for research on language and cultural contact, especially in the bateyes. Articles published on these topics include “Mwen pale espanyòl un chin: La diáspora haitiana y el contacto lingüístico en la República Dominicana” (2017, Peter Lang), and “El contacto del español con el náhuatl y el mixteco en México” (2021, De Gruyter). Her current research focuses on the semantics of motion verb constructions (with a special focus on COME and GO) in French and Haitian Creole (but also in other Romance languages such as Spanish and Catalan) and in language contact situations (“Zur Semantik von aller + Infinitiv im Kontext des Französischen in Afrika”, 2020 in Romanistik in Geschichte und Gegenwart 26.1). In the field of applied linguistics, she works on language diversity and language rights (accepted, “Language diversity and language rights”, De Gruyter).

Sofia Rüdiger is a postdoctoral research associate at the Chair of English Linguistics at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, with a research focus on World Englishes, digital communication, language and food, and pragmatics. In 2017, she completed her PhD work on English in South Korea, which was later published in John Benjamins’ Varieties of English Around the World series as the monograph Morpho-Syntactic Patterns in Spoken Korean English (2019). She is editor of the World Englishes special issue Discourse Markers and World Englishes (with Sven Leuckert, 2021) and her work on Asian varieties of English has resulted in the design and compilation of two spoken corpora: SPOKE (corpus of Spoken Korean English) and TASE (corpus of Taiwanese Spoken English; with Jakob R. E. Leimgruber). Her journal articles in the field of variational linguistics have appeared, among others, in English World-Wide, World Englishes, and English Today. In addition, she is author of The Language of Pick-Up Artists – Online Discourses of the Seduction Industry (with Daria Dayter, Routledge, 2022) and editor of Talking about Food (with Susanne Mühleisen, John Benjamins, 2020) and Corpus Approaches to Social Media (with Daria Dayter, John Benjamins, 2020).

Valentina Serreli is Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her domains of research are Arabic linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and language attitudes and ideologies. In 2016, she completed a jointly supervised PhD at the University of Sassari and the University of Aix-Marseille (IREMAM), with a dissertation titled Society, Languages and Ideologies in the Oasis of Siwa – Listening to People’s Voices, about language practices and ideologies and the shift to bilingualism in the Amazigh-speaking oasis of Siwa (Egypt). Her recently published papers on the topic include “Language and identity in Siwa Oasis: Indexing belonging, localness, and authenticity in a small minority community” (2017, in Identity and Dialect Performance edited by R. Bassiouney), “Contact-induced change from speakers’ perspectives: A study of language attitudes in Siwa” (2018, in Arabic in Contact – Studies in Arabic Linguistics edited by S. Manfredi and M. Tosco) and “Identity work through language choice in the Siwa Oasis: The exploitation and iconisation of Siwi” (2019, in Language & Communication 68). She is currently researching the Arabic spoken in the Siwa Oasis as L1 and L2, within the 3-year project Modernity, Migration and Minorities – Three Case Studies of Arabic in Contact, funded by the German Research Foundation DFG.