Linguapax
The Handbook of Language Contact
EDITOR: Raymond Hickey
TITLE: The Handbook of Language Contact
SERIES TITLE: Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Wiley-Blackwell
YEAR: 2010
Hugo C. Cardoso, Centro de Estudos de Linguística Geral e Aplicada, Universidade
de Coimbra
SUMMARY
Despite its century-long history, contact linguistics has received unprecedented attention in the past decades, and it is in this context that one must view the publication of ''The handbook of contact linguistics'' (henceforth HLC), edited by Raymond Hickey for the Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics series. While a handbook is essentially a reference work aimed at introducing particular
concepts for a given discipline, it is also, by its encompassing nature, an opportunity to capture the current state of that discipline and the directions in which it is moving. HLC first and foremost testifies to the pervasiveness of contact in modern linguistic thinking. It clarifies the extent to which contact linguistics has made, and continues to make, inroads into various subfields of
linguistics, and the diversity of linguistic and geographical settings to which
it has been applied.