 When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Languages normally develop by gradually accumulating internal differences until one parent language splits into daughter languages. This phenomenon of language contact is responsible for the world's vast linguistic diversity. The following forms of language contact constitute the focus of this e-lecture. First we will deal with several aspects of borrowing. We will then turn our attention to the principles of multilingualism and diglossia and will eventually look at pigeons and creoles, typical contact languages. Let us start with borrowing. Now when languages come into contact, they tend to take words from one another and make them part of their own vocabulary. These words are known as long words and the process is referred to as linguistic borrowing. The situation during the middle English period from 1100 to 1500 is a good example where numerous French words enter the English language. By the way, the term borrowing is a curious one, isn't it? Neither does the lending or donor language lose the borrowed word in the process nor does the borrowing or recipient language intend to give it back. So a more appropriate label would be copying, wouldn't it? But it is referred to as borrowing, so we stick to that term. By the way, not only words can be borrowed, but any linguistic material, sounds, syntactic patterns, discourse strategies and so on and so forth. So borrowing is one of the most common ways of acquiring new words across languages. As I said, English, for example, has borrowed numerous French words, especially after the Norman invasion. Here are some examples. They come from the areas of titles, the area of religion, science, and last but not least, words that belong to the word field of food. The integration of borrowed items involves their remodeling to fit the phonological and morphological structure of the recipient language. Let us illustrate this. Take the word email and the past participle emailed in the form he has emailed. Now try to form the past participle of the word in your own language. In my mother tongue, German, the noun is email and the past participle is ge-emailed or gemailed. And this matches the German principles of final devoicing, gemailed, and its system of verbal inflection, gemailed. And last but not least, the vowel is no longer a diphthong but a mid-high front vowel. Some types of words are borrowed more readily than others. For example, we have nouns that are relatively frequent examples of borrowings, whereas numerals or determiners or function words or simple verbs, color items and so on and so forth, to mention a few examples, occur less frequently in the system of borrowing. Another way of exploiting the resources of the donor language is the so-called calc. Now calc, also referred to as loan translation or semantic loan, describes new words or phrases formed by taking a foreign word as a model and translating it morpheme by morpheme. Take the German word schwarzmarkt, where schwarz means black and markt means market. Well, and the result is black market in present day English. A further way of exploiting foreign languages extracts morphemes from their vocabularies and imports them into the recipient language, where they serve as building blocks for new words. These building blocks are called combining forms. English makes use of this strategy on a massive scale in order to create scientific and technical terms from Greek and Latin. In fact, some combining forms have become so familiar to speakers that they attach them to a wide range of item, including native English words. Take the prefix mega as an example where you have things like mega event, mega phone, mega star, which are now common present day English words. One situation of language contact relatively rare today involves contact between relatively small groups leading to extensive multilingualism and diffusion of both vocabulary and grammar across their languages. Examples include areas from Papua New Guinea, the Amazon basin and the Australian desert. Other situations involve geographical proximity between different language communities with only slow spread of features across languages, creating so-called Sprachbund or linguistic areas. An example is the Balkan Sprachbund, where speakers of typologically distinct languages like Greek, Albanian, Romanian, Bulgarian and so on have adopted features from each other over the centuries. Language contact may also involve the use of distinct languages within the same community by bilingual or multilingual speakers. This can lead to a high degree of convergence between very different languages. It occurred with languages like Urdu, Kannada or Marathi in India. In other communities the ability to manipulate two codes can lead to very intricate patterns of code alternation and code mixture. Some communities have highly regular patterns of code switching according to the setting or context of speech resulting in what is called Daiglossia, where one code is used in informal contexts such as the home, neighborhood, etc. while the other is used in more formal settings such as school, church, government and the like. An example of such a situation is Algeria where Arabic, French and Tamazacht are used in different settings. In other communities a high degree of code mixture may be preferred perhaps because it reflects a sharing of identities. When groups perceive each other as different either in terms of power relationships or ethnic and cultural identity, language boundaries then become more like borders which must be defended, as it happened with French and English in Kannada. Among the most interesting cases of language contact are those which came about as a result of trade or of colonial expansion. This has led to varying kinds of linguistic compromise for the purpose of exchanging goods. The simplest form of such a contact language is the lingua franca. That is a special purpose language. For example, when the European tradesmen extended their market to other countries, it often occurred that a simplified form of their mother tongue was used as business language between tradesmen with different tribal and linguistic backgrounds, here illustrated by two African flags. Such a special purpose language is referred to as lingua franca. Now when the Europeans left, the native citizens continued to use this lingua franca and now referred to as pigeon. The term pigeon itself is generally agreed to derive from business. Some pigeons involve more mixture of vocabulary than others. For example, russenorsk, used in trade between Russians and Norwegians up to the 19th century, employed vocabulary from both languages. Pigeons show varying degrees of elaboration in both vocabulary and grammar, if their range of function extends beyond the confines of the original context of use. Some pigeons achieve such a high degree of elaboration in this way that there are in principle no longer pigeons, but fully developed natural languages. Examples include languages like Bislama, the official language of Vanuatu, an island in the Pacific Ocean, that descended from an earlier Pacific trade pigeon. Let us listen to Bislama as an example. Now here is this Bislama version of the story The North Wind and the Sun. Wind with the sun, you will like to pronounce Lofa in the mouth, say, who now is most strong. Alley, one man you walk about, you come, more you wear one corset. You will like, you agree, say, can you wear even in mania? More you make him say, mania, you carry more corsets along him, him now is most strong. Well, okay, this illustrates that Bislama is a language in its own right. Now, when what originated as a pigeon becomes the native language of a group of people, a creole has developed. This typically occurs when the speakers of a pigeon have children. Their children grow up with the pigeon as their first language, which is now referred to as creole. As soon as this situation stabilizes, the pigeon, now the creole, increases in complexity, eventually becoming a full-fledged language in its own right. Depending on the contact with its source language, the creole and the source may become mutually unintelligible. The continuum between the source language and the creole is referred to as post-creole continuum. Now, most creole languages, such as, for example, Jamaican creole, consist of a spectrum of varieties between those most and those least similar to the superstrate language, in the case of Jamaican creole, of course, English. Due to social, political, and economic factors, a creole language can decreolize towards one of the languages from which it descended. Now, so it decreolizes going into this direction. And by decreolizing, it aligns its morphology, its phonology, and its syntax to the local standard of the dominant language. But to different degrees, depending on a speaker's status, the following terms are used to define the so-called post-creole continuum. On the one hand, we have the so-called acrolect, that is, the creole form closest to the superstrate language. This can be contrasted with the basilect, the form that is most remote from the superstrate language. And somewhere in the middle, an intermediate form of the creole is called the mesolect. Most speakers of a creole have a command of a range in the continuum, and depending on their social position, occupation, etc., they can implement the different levels with various levels of skill. Now, here are some examples of Jamaican creole to exemplify the differences between a basilect and its corresponding mesolect and acrolect forms. The superstrate of the versions we are now going to present is, of course, present-day English, so let's listen to it in its received pronunciation British English standard form. The north wind and the sun were disputing which was the stronger when a traveller came along wrapped in a warm cloak. Okay, typical RP version pronounced by a former colleague of mine. Let us now listen to some versions of Jamaican creole on the basis of the post-creole continuum. The first one is an acrolect version. Here it is. The north wind and the sun were disputing which was the stronger when a traveller came along wrapped in a warm cloak. Okay, so this was the acrolect version. We can relatively easily understand that it's, if you wish, Jamaican English. Now the remaining two versions are a little bit more complicated and I have support here. Now to my left is André Chiraya. André Chiraya comes from Kingston, Jamaica and he will do the basilect and the mesolect version first. So André, welcome first. Thank you for having me. Would you like to introduce yourself? Yes, my name is André Chiraya and it's a pleasure to be here helping with this session. Okay, thank you André. Now can we start with the mesolect version? Can you read that for us? The north breeze and the sun are argue about who trangled and who, when one traveller comes wrapped up in our sweater. Okay, thank you very much. That sounds relatively remote from English but there are some things which we can understand relatively well. And now the basilect version please. The north wind and the sun did a course about which one of them trangled. When them seawall man come well wrapped up in our seat and will look like our winter cloak. I didn't understand it at all I must admit and this is then really unintelligible to me and thus a language in its own right. So thank you very much André for this demonstration. Thank you for having me. Okay, let's now summarize. In this e-lecture we have discussed several types of language contact ranging from borrowing to the emergence of new languages such as Creoles. But we should be aware of the fact that it's not languages that come into contact with each other but that it is always the speakers of the languages who are in contact. Their attitudes towards each other will by a large effect the way they speak. If you want to find out more about contact languages and about all those languages that have influenced each other, I recommend consulting our new language index where you can examine a large corpus of audio supported language samples and if you wish contribute with an entry of your own. Thank you very much.