The awareness of language that culminated in France with the French Revolution has remained dominant till the present day: a nation une et indivisible corresponds to a concept of the national language as a homogenous entity, self-sufficient and free from outside and dialectal influences. This conception is contradicted by two historical facts, however. Firstly, various waves of language contact were constitutive of the emergence and development of the French language from the very beginning. Secondly, a new structure of varieties developed through the colonial expansion of France outside Europe, in which many forms of language contact are of significant importance. The best way to capture this diversity adequately is to adhere to a broadly ecological approach (linguistic ecology) that takes into account various parameters, such as history, social context, competence, and universals. This is demonstrated with samples of transcribed speech from Togo, Guadeloupe and Nova Scotia. The linguistic ecology approach is the guiding principle of all the articles in this volume.

As editor of the Journal of Language contact (JLC), I would like to make two important points concerning the content and the structure of its sixth volume.My first point concerns an organizational matter.In the previous volume, JLC encouraged publication of review articles which would lead to productive debates and open pathways for further publication of special thematic issues.The present volume puts this intention into practice.This first issue (6.1) contains a number of articles on a variety of topics.The 'Reviews' section has been expanded: it consists of two critical reviews of publications which we found suitable for this purpose.The second, thematic, issue will be put together by a team of Invited Editors.Jointly with the Editorial Board of JLC they will present a state-of-the-art collection on 'Contact Among Genetically

Yakubovich (2010), in arguing convincingly that Hittite borrowed its enclitic reflexive particle from Luvian, emphasizes that this contact-induced change in the pronominal system was due not only to close and prolonged contact between speakers of the two languages, but also to the structural (in this case genetic) similarity of the respective systems (2010: 197ff.). Most discussion by Yakubovich and others has focused on Luvian influence on Hittite, prehistoric and in the Middle and New Hittite period. While a few lexical borrowings from Hittite into Luvian have been acknowledged, the question of Hittite-induced changes in Luvian grammatical morphemes has received little or no attention. I will argue that the likewise very similar systems of “local adverbs” and “preverbs” in the two languages led to a borrowing from Hittite into Luvian in this set of grammatical morphemes. While fine details assure a borrowing in this case, overall facts make borrowing far less likely in a second case to be considered. The very similarity of the respective systems makes it hard to determine whether the latter represents common inheritance or parallel independent developments possibly made more convergent by contact.

This paper studies code-switching between Andalusian Arabic and Romance in the kharjas, the closing verses of the muwashshahaat poems. These poems, dating from the 11th to the 14th centuries, were composed in Classical Arabic, while the kharjas were written in two languages of Al-Andalus: Andalusian Arabic and Romance. The purpose is to investigate to what degree the structural aspect of code-switching in the kharjas conforms to descriptions in the current literature on code-switching in bilingual communities and what that tells us about the degree of bilingualism in Al-Andalus. The 43 kharjas (Corriente, 2008) present a total of 104 code-switches: 82 intra-sentential, 13 word-internal and 9 inter-sentential. The base language in the majority of cases is Romance: 73 % of the switches occurred from Romance to Arabic. Cross- tabulations of the direction of the switch, lexical category of the switched parts and what immediately precedes and follows them show statistically significant relationships, indicating that the code-switches found in this corpus are not the result of a random process of language mixing resulting in “an outlandish and deliberately unsophisticated patois” (Monroe, 1974:31). A study of the intra-sentential code-switches also contributes to an explanation of the behavior of the Arabic definite article, al- and its allomorphs, in Arabic loanwords.

The study of Sri Lanka Malay has focussed on the genesis scenario, where theories of creolization (Smith et al., 2004; Smith & Paauw, 2006) with a dominant role of Tamil compete with theories of convergence (Bakker, 2006; Ansaldo, 2008), which allow for a more important role of Sinhala. This paper assesses and reevaluates the empirical data brought forward by both sides and contributes more empirical data on parallels with Sinhala. These parallels are partly due to substrate reinforcement (Siegel, 1998) of marginal structures found in Malay varieties, partly they are clear calques on Sinhala patterns. Some structures must be analysed as the result of Early Sinhala Influence during the colonial period, while for others, a later development following socio-political changes after independence is possible (Late Sinhala Influence). The paper argues that SLM changes towards Sinhala at both periods can be seen as a kind of metatypy comparable to other language contact settings in Eurasia and Papua.

Africa has up until now been considered a continent where switch-reference systems are extremely rare. This study shows that there is a confined area in the South of Ethiopia where many Omotic languages and a few Cushitic languages have fully grammaticalised switch-reference systems on dependent (co-)subordinate non-final verbs, so-called converbs. The paper describes in detail the switch-reference system of Kambaata (Cushitic) and gives an overview of the distribution of switch-reference systems in Ethiopia in general. It is argued that switch-reference marking in Cushitic languages is the result of contact with neighbouring Omotic languages.