With this detailed and comprehensive survey, Maarten Kossmann provides not only Berberists and Arabists, but also all linguists interested in language contact and related issues, with an impressive amount of data and with food for thought. Based on considerable documentation, his work offers a synthesis that had never been attempted before of most of the elements in the Maghrebian Berber languages that could be considered to be borrowings from Arabic, with a careful evaluation, in each case, of the validity of such an attribution. For this purpose, the author gives a summary of the relevant Arabic facts, followed by a detailed account of the Berber ones, which often leads him to real small monographic treatments of problems. From this point of view, his work can be considered, at least regarding the many issues studied, a historical and comparative grammar of ‘Northern Berber’. Therefore it seemed to us that this significant work deserved far more than a short notice, and we decided to review it in detail.

The American Midwest is an area that stretches over huge distances. Yet it seems that the Norwegian language in this whole area has some similarities, particularly at the lexical level. Comparisons of three types of vocabulary across the whole area, as well as across time, building on accounts in the previous literature from Haugen (1953) onwards, are carried out. The results of these comparisons convince the authors that it is justified to refer to this language as one lexically defined dialect, which we call lexicolect.

This paper examines the emergence of perfective aspect in Cantonese-English bilingual children from the perspective of contact-induced grammaticalization, focusing on the novel use of already. Although the adverbial already seems to serve a function similar to that of the Cantonese perfective marker zo2 in the bilingual children, other model constructions suggest that the function of already may combine those of several Cantonese particles such as the sentence-final particle laa3. The results suggest that in contact-induced grammaticalization, it is possible to develop a new category in the replica language based on multiple different but related categories in the model language. Adopting an evolutionary approach to language transmission (Mufwene, 2001), we discuss why grammaticalization in the Cantonese-English bilingual children does not seem to involve coevolution of form and meaning, why the grammaticalization phenomena in the bilingual children are only transient, and how the study of bilingual acquisition can contribute to contact linguistics.

Code-switching (cs) is a common occurrence in spoken language among bilingual and multilingual language speakers. This makes its use a customary practice in Computer Mediated Communication (cmc) genres as used by such speakers. This study examines instances of Code-switching in the Computer Mediated Communication data collected in order to find out whether code-switching in cmc is equivalent to code-switching in spoken language in terms of spontaneity, motivation and discourse functions. The study is based on previous studies in code-switching, for example, Gumperz (1982), and Myers-Scotton (1992). These studies point to the fact that code-switching in spoken language can be “conscious and deliberate” when it is motivated by various factors. The examined cmc data is derived from Kenyan University students and is in form of messages from various cmc genres including sms text messages, e-mail, Instant Messages and Social Network Sites such as Facebook and YouTube. The languages in focus are Swahili, English and vernacular languages which are spoken in Kenya. The findings suggest that although code-switching in cmc is to some extent similar to spoken code-switching in terms of language manifestation and deliberateness, its discourse functions reveal features that are specific to cmc contexts. The study concludes that code-switching in cmc should be viewed and treated as a unique and distinct entity from spoken-code-switching in order to capture its inherent attributes.

The present study examines two aspects of determiner phrases (dps) that have been previously investigated in Spanish/English code-switching; namely, the openness of semantic domains to non-native nouns and gender assignment in monolingual versus code-switched speech. The quantitative analysis of naturalistic, oral production data from 62 native speakers of Northern Belizean Spanish revealed both similarities and notable differences vis-à-vis previous findings for varieties of Spanish/English code-switching in the u.s. Hispanophone context. Semantic domains that favoured non-native nouns in Spanish/English dps included academia, technology, work/money-related terms, abstract concepts, linguistics/language terms and everyday items. In relation to gender assignation, assignment patterns in monolingual dps were canonical whereas an overwhelming preference for the masculine default gender was attested in mixed dps. Biological gender was not found to be deterministic in switched dps. The analysis highlights the important role that type of code-switching has on contact outcomes in bi/multilingual communities, as speech patterns are reflective of the status and resourcefulness that code-switching is afforded at a societal and idiolectal level.

This paper compares the conceptual framework of Schuchardt’s perspective on language mixing (or at least my representation of it) with that of ‘semiotic dynamics’ as presented in several of my earlier works (Nicolaï, 2011, 2012a). These two approaches entail a same interest in the activities of individuals and groups (communication actors, etc.) who, in their ordinary usage, produce and transform languages. Thus the framework of semiotic dynamics introduces conceptualizations, obviously developed independently of the process which « Slawo-deutsches und Slawo-italienisches » exemplifies, but which, despite differing trajectories, intersects with it. This intersection justifies my assertion as to the work’s modernity and the usefulness of reviewing it. At the same time, this review broadens the scope of research and reflections in this field. In counterpoint, I will look into the justified (or not) propensity of scholars and documenters to consider a priori the objects-languages with which they work as constitutively homogeneous entities, albeit subject to modification and transformation by a (contingent) contact situation.