Includes bibliographical references and index.

The Editors: Introduction. Ronelle ALEXANDER: Tracking Sprachbund Boundaries: Word Order in the Balkans. Peter BAKKER: Convergence Intertwining: An Alternative Way Towards the Genesis of Mixed Languages. David BECK: Bella Coola and North Wakashan: Convergence and Diversity in the Northwest Coast Sprachbund. Liya V. BONDARKO: Language Contacts: Phonetic Aspects. Hélène BRIJNEN: German Influence on Sorbian Aspect: The Function of Directional Adverbs. Bernard COMRIE: Language Contact, Lexical Borrowing, and Semantic Fields. Ellen COURTNEY: Duplication in the L2 Spanish Produced by Quechua-speaking Children: Transfer of a Pragmatic Strategy. N. Louanna FURBEE: Prestige, Power, and Potential for Language Shift: The Intrusion of Spanish into Tojolab'Al Maya. Lenore A. GRENOBLE: Morphosyntactic Change: The Impact of Russian on Evenki. Ekaterina GRUZDEVA: Aspects of Russian-Nivkh Grammatical Interference: The Nivkh Imperative. Cornelius HASSELBLATT: Estonian Between German and Russian: Facts and Fiction about Language Interference. Wilbert HEERINGA, John NERBONNE, Hermann NIEBAUM, Rogier NIEUWEBOER, Peter KLEIWEG: Dutch-German Contact in and Around Bentheim. Peter HOUTZAGERS: Effects of Language Contact as a Source of (Non)Information: The Historical Reconstruction of Burgenland Kajkavian. Lars JOHANSON: Linguistic Convergence in the Volga Area. Marina KHASANOVA: The Lower Amur Languages in Contact with Russian. Ane KLEINE: Varieties in Contact and Their Impact on Language Planning in Yiddish. Yuri KLEINER and Natalia SVETOZAROVA: Quantity Loss in Yiddish: A Slavic Feature? Alexandr KRASOVICKY and Christian SAPPOK: The Isolated Russian Dialectal System in Contact with Tungus Languages in Siberia and the Far East. Jurij KUSMENKO and Michael RIESSLER: Traces of Sámi-Scandinavian Contact in Scandinavian Dialects. Wouter KUSTERS: Morphological Simplification: More than Erosion? Jouko LINDSTEDT: Linguistic Balkanization: Contact-Induced Change by Mutual Reinforcement. Patrick-André MATHER: Creole Genesis: Evidence from West African L2 French. Pieter MUYSKEN: From Linguistic Areas to Areal Linguistics: A Research Proposal. Larissa NAIDITCH: Code-Switching and -Mixing in Russian-Hebrew Bilinguals. Irina NEVSKAJA: Shor-Russian Contact Features. Cecilia ODÉ: Some Notes on Prosody in Mpur and Local Indonesian. Pavel A. SKRELIN: Sound Databases in the Study of Phonetic Interference. Sarah GREY THOMASON: Linguistic Areas and Language History. Hanna TOBY: On the Low German Influence on Kashubian Dialects. Nina B. VOLSKAYA and Anna S. GRIGORYAN: Typological and Language Specific Features in Intonation Questions of Armenian and English.

The present volume includes papers that were presented at the conference Languages in Contact at the University of Groningen (25-26 November 1999). The conference was held to celebrate the University of St. Petersburg's award of an honorary doctorate to Tjeerd de Graaf of Groningen. In general, the issues discussed in the articles involve pidgins and creoles, minorities and their languages, Diaspora situations, Sprachbund phenomena, extralinguistic correlates of variety in contact situations, problems of endangered languages and the typology of these languages. Special attention is paid to contact phenomena between languages of the Russian Empire / USSR / Russian Federation, their survival and the influence of Russian.

Description based on print version record.