The Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact (CALC) series was set up to publish outstanding monographs on language contact, especially by authors who approach their specific subject matter from a diachronic or developmental perspective. Our goal is to integrate the ever-growing scholarship on language diversification (including the development of creoles, pidgins, and indigenized varieties of colonial European languages), bilingual language development, code-switching, and language endangerment. We hope to provide a select forum to scholars who contribute insightfully to understanding language evolution from an interdisciplinary perspective. We favor approaches that highlight the role of ecology and draw inspiration both from the authors’ own fields of specialization and from related research areas in linguistics or other disciplines. Eclecticism is one of our mottoes, as we endeavor to comprehend the complexity of evolutionary processes associated with contact.

We are proud to add to our list Bridget Drinka's Language Contact in Europe: The Periphrastic Perfect through History. Few researchers have undertaken the daunting task that the author has embarked upon in this comprehensive book, namely to track down the origins of the periphrastic perfect construction in Europe (which is quite complex) and to trace its diffusion across the map, while at the same time assessing the role of language contact as an essential element in this development. The book takes a wide-angle perspective, spanning the geographical breadth of Europe – from Portuguese to Finnish, from Icelandic to Bulgarian – and it delves into the 2,500-year-old history of the perfects and resultatives on this continent. Besides large-scale developments, Drinka also focuses on the micro-level responses to these “macro-historical processes”: she documents not only the movement of innovations across a population, such as the spread of HAVE-resultatives from German into the West Slavic languages, but also the role of the individual speaker as the transmitter of change. She presents, for example, the remarkable case of the Aragonese scribe who, in May 1147, switched from Visigothic to Caroline script, signaling not just a change in the scribal tradition but also an entire realignment of cultural allegiance toward trans-Pyrenean norms. This realignment is also reflected in the increased use of BE perfects in this area. The role of sociohistorical events as actuators of change is one of the strengths of this book.

Drinka adduces extensive empirical evidence to support her striking – and undoubtedly controversial – conclusions concerning the origin and spread of the perfects.

The series Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact (CALC) was set up to publish outstanding monographs on language contact, especially by authors who approach their specific subject matter from a diachronic or developmental perspective. Our goal is to integrate the ever-growing scholarship on language diversification (including the development of creoles, pidgins, and indigenized varieties of colonial European languages), bilingual language development, code-switching, and language endangerment. We hope to provide a select forum to scholars who contribute insightfully to understanding language evolution from an interdisciplinary perspective. We favor approaches that highlight the role of ecology and draw inspiration both from the authors’ own fields of specialization and from related research areas in linguistics or other disciplines. Eclecticism is one of our mottoes, as we endeavor to comprehend the complexity of evolutionary processes associated with contact.

We are very proud to add to our list Carmen Silva-Corvalán’s Bilingual Language Acquisition: Spanish and English in the First Six Years. The author provides detailed analyses of language development data collected over several years from two siblings who happen to be her own grandchildren. She compares the data and her findings with those of other English-Spanish bilingual children reported in the literature, and with other interesting cases involving other languages, such as the Cantonese-English bilingual children that were the focus of a previous publication in the CALC series: The Bilingual Child by Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews (2007). Thus the book provides findings that facilitate informed comparisons that raise questions about universals of bilingual language development and the role of the social environments provided by the home and the extended family in determining ecology-specific peculiarities.

The series Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact (CALC) was set up to publish outstanding monographs on language contact, especially by authors who approach their specific subject matter from a diachronic or developmental perspective. Our goal is to integrate the ever-growing scholarship on language diversification (including the development of creoles, pidgins, and indigenized varieties of colonial European languages), bilingual language development, code-switching, and language endangerment. We hope to provide a select forum to scholars who contribute insightfully to understanding language evolution from an interdisciplinary perspective. We favour approaches that highlight the role of ecology and draw inspiration both from the authors' own fields of specialization and from related research areas in linguistics or other disciplines. Eclecticism is one of our mottoes, as we endeavour to comprehend the complexity of evolutionary processes associated with contact.

We are very happy to add to our list Jan Blommaert's The Sociolinguistics of Globalization, an authoritative invitation to rethink linguistic communication in a world that has become increasingly interconnected, is marked by more and more mobility of both people and commodities (including language) as well as by socio-economic inequities, and is undeniably polycentric. Some hegemonic languages, chiefly English, have spread world-wide but have not only become ‘global’ but also indigenized, both adapted to new communicative habits and subjected to local norms. Consequently, their market values are not universally identical across national borders; in fact, not even within the same borders. It is more and more a question of whose English it is and where it is spoken.

The series Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact was set up to publish outstanding monographs on language contact, especially by authors who approach their specific subject matter from a diachronic or developmental perspective. Our goal is to integrate the ever-growing scholarship on language diversification (including the development of creoles, pidgins, and indigenized varieties of colonial European languages), bilingual language development, code-switching, and language endangerment. We hope to provide a select forum to scholars who contribute insightfully to understanding language evolution from an interdisciplinary perspective. We favour approaches that highlight the role of ecology and draw inspiration both from the authors' own fields of specialization and from related research areas in linguistics or other disciplines. Eclecticism is one of our mottoes, as we endeavour to comprehend the complexity of evolutionary processes associated with contact.

We are very proud to add to our list J. Clancy Clements' The linguistic legacy of Spanish and Portuguese, a very informative account of, first, the evolution of Portuguese and Spanish from Latin and, then, their subsequent transformation into several non-European varieties. The general perspective throughout the book is that of colonial expansion, language spread, language contact, and language shift. Without explicitly espousing uniformitarianism, Clements highlights the role of substrate influence through naturalistic second language acquisition, as well as the particular ways in which the external ecologies of language contact variably constrain the significance of this particular factor, against inheritance from the lexifier, in the relevant evolutionary processes.