This book traces the spread of the perfect tense across Europe, demonstrating the crucial role of language contact.

Open publicationThe Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of the continents of the world. The book supplies profiles of the language families of Europe, including the sign languages. It also discusses the areal typology, paying attention to the Standard Average European, Balkan, Baltic and Mediterranean convergence areas. Separate chapters deal with the old and new minority languages and with non-standard varieties. A major focus is language politics and policies, including discussions of the special status of English, the relation between language and the church, language and the school, and standardization. The history of European linguistics is another focus as is the history of multilingual European 'empires' and their dissolution. The volume is especially geared towards a graduate and advanced undergraduate readership. It has been designed such that it can be used, as a whole or in parts, as a textbook, the first of its kind, for graduate programmes with a focus on the linguistic (and linguistics) landscape of Europe.

The second edition of the definitive reference on contact studies and linguistic change—provides extensive new research and original case studies Language contact is a dynamic area of contemporary linguistic research that studies how language changes when speakers of different languages interact. Accessibly structured into three sections, The Handbook of Language Contact explores the role of contact studies within the field of linguistics, the value of contact studies for language change research, and the relevance of language contact for sociolinguistics. This authoritative volume presents original findings and fresh research directions from an international team of prominent experts. Thirty-seven specially-commissioned chapters cover a broad range of topics and case studies of contact from around the world. Now in its second edition, this valuable reference has been extensively updated with new chapters on topics including globalization, language acquisition, creolization, code-switching, and genetic classification. Fresh case studies examine Romance, Indo-European, African, Mayan, and many other languages in both the past and the present. Addressing the major issues in the field of language contact studies, this volume: Includes a representative sample of individual studies which re-evaluate the role of language contact in the broader context of language and society Offers 23 new chapters written by leading scholars Examines language contact in different societies, including many in Africa and Asia Provides a cross-section of case studies drawing on languages across the world The Handbook of Language Contact, Second Edition is an indispensable resource for researchers, scholars, and students involved in language contact, language variation and change, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and language theory.

History, archaeology, and human evolutionary genetics provide us with an increasingly detailed view of the origins and development of the peoples that live in Northwestern Europe. This book aims to restore the key position of historical linguistics in this debate by treating the history of the Germanic languages as a history of its speakers. It focuses on the role that language contact has played in creating the Germanic languages, between the first millennium BC and the crucially important early medieval period. Chapters on the origins of English, German, Dutch, and the Germanic language family as a whole illustrate how the history of the sounds of these languages provide a key that unlocks the secret of their genesis: speakers of Latin, Celtic and Balto-Finnic switched to speaking Germanic and in the process introduced a 'foreign accent' that caught on and spread at the expense of types of Germanic that were not affected by foreign influence. The book is aimed at linguists, historians, archaeologists and anyone who is interested in what languages can tell us about the origins of their speakers.

This comprehensive new work provides extensive evidence for the essential role of language contact as a primary trigger for change. Unique in breadth, it traces the spread of the periphrastic perfect across Europe over the last 2,500 years, illustrating at each stage the micro-responses of speakers and communities to macro-historical pressures. Among the key forces claimed to be responsible for normative innovations in both eastern and western Europe is 'roofing' - the superstratal influence of Greek and Latin on languages under the influence of Greek Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism respectively. The author provides a new interpretation of the notion of 'sprachbund', presenting the model of a three-dimensional stratified convergence zone, and applies this model to her analysis of the have and be perfects within the Charlemagne sprachbund. The book also tackles broader theoretical issues, for example, demonstrating that the perfect tense should not be viewed as a universal category.

Over the past few decades, the book series Linguistische Arbeiten [Linguistic Studies], comprising over 500 volumes, has made a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory both in Germany and internationally. The series will continue to deliver new impulses for research and maintain the central insight of linguistics that progress can only be made in acquiring new knowledge about human languages both synchronically and diachronically by closely combining empirical and theoretical analyses. To this end, we invite submission of high-quality linguistic studies from all the central areas of general linguistics and the linguistics of individual languages which address topical questions, discuss new data and advance the development of linguistic theory.

Most of us know of the Indo-European roots of European languages, but how did this precursor language take hold and what did Europe look like before it did so? This book explores the continent before the spread of the Indo-Europeans, examines its indigenous population and the contacts it had with Indo-European and Uralic immigrants, and, ultimately, asks how these origins led to the development of that crucial singularity for Europe’s languages. Drawing on archaeology, religious studies, and palaeography, the contributors offer a detailed and comprehensive picture of Europe’s linguistic and, in turn, cultural prehistory.