Contact has always been a normal part of the development of languages, from those of ancient empires, those of colonial expansion, and to those of our globalizing planet today. Pidgin and creole studies have merged with the study of other language contact phenomena (adult second-language acquisition, bilingualism, bilingual mixed languages, language shift, partially restructured languages, language attrition, etc.) to form the flourishing field of contact linguistics.

This new Routledge Major Work brings together the most important contributions advancing our understanding of language contact phenomena. Beginning fitfully in the mid-nineteenth century and then gathering momentum after 1960, the field of pidgin and creole linguistics has developed from a marginal field associated with the stigma of the languages it studied to a subfield which is now at the centre of linguistic enquiry. As it became clear that contact, far from being bizarre, has always been a normal part of the development of languages, from those of ancient empires to those of colonial expansion to those of our globalising planet today, pidgin and creole studies have merged with the study of other language contact phenomena (adult second language acquisition, bilingualism, bilingual mixed languages, language shift, partially restructured languages, language attrition, etc) to form the new field of contact linguistics.

This selection of the most important contributions advancing our understanding of language contact phenomena covers almost two hundred years of scholarship and will provide students with an overview of how insights about the new languages that emerged as a result of European expansion to Africa, Asia, the New World and the Pacific have led to a clearer view of what language is.

Articles are arranged chronologically; unusually for a Critical Concepts collection, each individual article is preceded by a short introduction making clear the intellectual context in which it was written, its thematic connection to earlier work, and why it is an important contribution to the field. As well as articles from scholarly journals, there are also some chapters from major books in the field. The collection is indexed for theme and language.