Language contact and change occur continuously, whether or not they are noted, recorded, or analyzed. The intensity and frequency vary, and can vary dramatically according to geographic and historic circumstances. Contributions to this volume revisit some of the topics last discussed in the 1997 Annual Review of Applied Linguistics on multilingualism (Grabe, 1997), update them with connections to the ever-increasing bibliography for these subjects, and extend them into some new directions. Many of these topics, and some of the new directions, testify to the vision of Charles A. Ferguson. His comprehensive grasp of the multiple points of intersection between language and society, prominent in the academic literature of the last forty years and epitomized by the selections in Huebner (1996), fully merits the special dedication of this volume.

After years of neglect, political theorists in the last few years have started to take an interest in issues of language policy, and to explore the normative issues they raise. In this chapter, we examine why this interest has arisen and provide an overview of the main approaches that have been developed. A series of recent events has made it clear that language policy is central to many of the traditional themes and concepts of political theory, such as democracy, citizenship, nationhood, and the state. The rise of ethnolinguistic conflict in Eastern Europe, the resurgence of language-based secessionist movements in Catalonia, Flanders, and Quebec, the backlash against immigrant multiculturalism, and the difficulties in building a pan-European sense of European Union citizenship—in all of these cases, linguistic diversity complicates attempts to build stable and cohesive forms of political community. In the past, political theorists have often implicitly assumed that this sort of linguistic diversity would disappear, as a natural concomitant of processes of modernization and nation-building. However, it is now widely accepted that linguistic diversity is an enduring fact about modern societies. As a result, political theorists have started to explore the justifications for minority language rights claims, and to consider how different models of language rights relate to broader political theories of justice, freedom, and democracy.

From its beginnings to the present, research in the field of language maintenance and shift has advocated the preservation of ethnic minority and immigrant languages. This review of current published literature, which continues that advocacy, focuses on a narrow time frame (approximately 1998–2002) in order to provide broad, worldwide coverage of different language contact situations. The discussion largely excludes questions of language policy and planning, but includes studies that use traditional as well as newer methodologies to illuminate how educational institutions, the media, ethnic language literacy, family relationships, and friendship networks—to name the more significant factors in maintenance—can be employed to encourage maintenance and language revitalization. After considering recent theoretical and critical works, this review surveys various countries in which research within ethnic and minority language communities illuminates language maintenance, or shift, or revitalization for that group. Current research suggests that use of the ethnic language in the family and friendship networks and its transgenerational transmission are still of crucial importance, as are the conditions in the greater society that provide support for its linguistic viability as a means of communication within and outside the immediate community.

This chapter surveys developments in language revitalization, a movement that dates approximately from the 1990s and builds on prior work on language maintenance (see Fishman, 1991; 2001) and language death (Dorian, 1981; 1989). Focusing on indigenous languages, it discusses the role and nature of appropriate linguistic documentation, possibilities for bilingual education, and methods of promoting oral fluency and intergenerational transmission in affected languages. Various avenues for language revitalization, a proactive approach to the continued use of a particular language, are then described (see Hinton & Hale, 2001). In contrast to the smaller minority languages of Europe that have long literary traditions, many indigenous languages in the Americas and elsewhere are solely or primarily oral languages; thus, revitalization efforts aim to promote conversational fluency among speakers in a community. Related literature falls into four main categories: (a) theoretical and empirical works on language revitalization; (b) applied works on revitalization in practice; (c) pedagogical and reference publications; and (d) legal documents that support or impede revitalization of languages. Recent examples of current literature in each category are reviewed.

In this chapter we present a brief overview of the literature on interpreting focused specifically on issues and questions raised by this literature about the nature of bilingualism in general. It is our position that research carried out on interpreting—while primarily produced with a professional audience in mind and concerned with improving the practice of interpreting—provides valuable insights about complex aspects of language contact that have not been thoroughly addressed by the existing literature on bilingualism. Examination of the literature emphasizing a category of bilinguals, who have been referred to as “true” bilinguals (Thiery, 1978a, b), provides perspectives on both individual and societal bilingualism that can complement, and possibly refocus, some current views of the linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic characteristics of language contact. For applied linguists who study language minority populations around the world, the literature on interpreting suggests important new directions for research focusing on areas such as the process of high level development of two languages in diglossic contexts; the effects of instruction on the development of nonsocietal languages; the nature of language transfer; and the characteristics of communication between speakers of societal and nonsocietal languages.

Until recently, the interaction between language and religion as topics relevant to bilingualism or multilingualism has been relatively little explored, although there is an extensive body of research on religious language. This chapter first provides an overview of earlier work, much of it on the translation of sacred texts into various languages. Past research has also identified the linguistic consequences of the spread of various religions, particularly with respect to choice of ritual language and orthographic systems. The language use patterns and practices historically characteristic of different religious traditions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Quakerism, are reviewed. The chapter then describes the linguistic effects of missionary activity in several postcolonial settings, concentrating mainly on those pertaining to Christian groups. Other recent research has examined the linguistic consequences of linkages between regionally prominent languages and dialects and religious practice in diverse international locations. Relationships between immigration and language maintenance and shift in religious domains are also discussed. The chapter concludes by noting that recent political events, interest in conversion efforts of religions other than Christianity, and growing recognition of the academic legitimacy of the field of language and religion predict a likely increase in applied linguistic research in this area.

This chapter reviews the multidimensional research on bilingual education, covering contexts where bilingual children are in transitional classrooms as well as schools where curriculum content is experienced in two (or more) languages. Bilingual education has become a major tool in language reversal planning, since language transmission within families within minority languages typically provides a considerable shortfall in language reproduction. To play its part in language reversal, bilingual education needs to show its relative effectiveness, both as an educational approach and for language maintenance planning. Immersion and dual language approaches have increasingly demonstrated such success. However, bilingual education is neither a universal panacea for language planners, nor is it effective purely due to dual language classroom approaches, as recent research reveals. Such research locates the political nature of bilingual education, not only at the level of policy making, but also in qualitative research in classrooms. It illuminates how language and literacy practices can latently legitimate and reproduce unequal relations between language majorities and minorities. Emerging directions in bilingual education research include trilingual education, the bilingual education of deaf students, the consequences of information technologies for bilingual classrooms, and the effect of the internationalization of English on language contact in schools. This reflects an international interest for research at the varying levels of philosophy, policy, provision, practice, and not least the politics of education as a site of language contact.

Manipulation of language is the key to all participation in the legal system. While linguists, especially sociolinguists, have been researching legal contexts for some two decades, there is still a considerable paucity of research on what happens when second language (L2) and second dialect (D2) speakers come into contact with the ‘language’ of the law. This chapter overviews the current state of theory and research on this topic. As with studies of L1 speakers, most of the studies have analyzed language in courtrooms, where access to data is much easier than in other legal settings, such as police interviews, mediation sessions or lawyer-client interviews. Most such research addresses one or more of the following questions, with the greatest concentration of research on the second and third of these: (a) What are the interpreting needs of second language speakers? (b) How are these needs being addressed? (c) What are the challenges to the provision of language services to second language speakers? And (d) How do dialectal differences affect the participation of second dialect speakers? The discussion concludes by highlighting a number of questions of crucial legal concern that need to be addressed by applied linguistics research.

In this chapter, we address, selectively, how applied linguists and those concerned with discourse analysis in particular, have recently approached the study of health care communication, especially in intercultural contexts, and relate these approaches to studies undertaken by researchers in other academic disciplines such as the sociology of medicine and by health care practitioners in the course of their own work. At issue will be questions concerning selected sites and themes, the degree of distinctiveness of research methodologies and different understandings of what counts as data, and questions concerning reflexivity and practical relevance in terms of the use to which findings can be put. Appreciating areas of difference and similarity is a necessary basis for establishing the desirable, but potentially problematic, partnerships among academic disciplines and between such disciplines and the work of professional practitioners, both in research and in professional development. As a sample site in the delivery of health care in the framework of cultural and linguistic diversity, we identify nursing, and use this site and its practices to advocate the collaboration of applied linguists, professional practitioners, and researchers from other areas of social science in the exploration of health care communication in multilingual/multicultural contexts and elsewhere.

Although business settings have been a site of language contact for many years, the field of “language in business” has changed substantially during the past two decades. The proliferation of topics and approaches has contributed to shaping what is now an eclectic disciplinary field, methodologically diverse. Thus, this review of the field will necessarily move beyond sociolinguistic approaches and theories of variation and change. In particular, the globalization of the workforce and the growth of multinational and multilingual corporations have strengthened the perception of English as the “lingua franca” of international business, though some recent research challenges aspects of this perception in multicultural corporate settings. Intercultural communication, especially recent developments in that field, including its “discursive turn” and its current preference for qualitative studies, has made a significant contribution to the study of multicultural/multilingual business interaction. In the concluding section, we discuss three particular areas of development: (a) the growth in the use of new media and the analysis of that use and its impact on business discourse in context; (b) the shift from the analysis of written to spoken discourse and from simulated data to naturally-occurring corporate language; (c) and the increasing need to study the language of the multilingual workplace. We argue for redressing the balance of research into business as a site of language contact in favor of less well-represented languages and cultures through indigenous discourse studies, and we note in particular the increasing frequency and importance of work involving Asian languages.

While the study of advertising discourse is a well-established research area in applied linguistics, language contact phenomena in advertising have often been neglected. This chapter reviews work on language contact phenomena in advertising. Recent work has shifted away from a long-standing focus on borrowings and loanwords. Currently, more emphasis is being placed on multilingual discourses in advertising and the ways in which these index identities, both of the products and services with which multiple codes are associated and of the consumers who peruse them. The chapter is also concerned with the various functions of different contact languages in advertising. Languages other than English imbue a product with an ethno-cultural stereotype about the group who speak the language. By contrast, English has largely become a nonnational language and has been appropriated by advertisers in non-English-speaking countries to index a social stereotype. English has become the language of modernity, progress, and globalization. The chapter ends with suggestions for future research deriving from recent developments in marketing, namely the emergence of the global super-brand.

It has long been apparent to scholars that gender exerts an influence on language change. Recently, however, the patterns of gender differentiation attested in empirical studies have been reinterpreted in the light of current social constructionist understandings of gender. Drawing on recent work in variationist sociolinguistics, sociology of language and linguistic anthropology, this chapter focuses on new approaches to explaining gender differentiated patterns of sound change and language shift, the success or failure of planned linguistic reforms, and changes in the social evaluation of gendered speech styles.

The interface between creole studies and language change has been a tumultuous area since the late 1990s. Evidence has been found confirming that children created Hawaiian Creole English; the “decreolization” approach to the creole continuum has become largely obsolete; work on creoles and grammaticalization has expanded beyond its former concentration on Tok Pisin; creolists working within the generative syntax tradition have questioned whether creolization is a distinct process at all; other work argues that creoles are synchronically as well as sociohistorically definable; and the very centrality of plantation contexts' sociology to creole genesis has been questioned. Concepts often taken as assumptions ten years ago are now widely questioned, even the very definition of creole itself.

A law student inquires whether a correction of sneaked to snuck suggests misinformation and misguided rigidity. This chapter reports an answer to that question in the context of better information about current legal usage and a perennial tendency to linguistic prescription. It also explores attitudes to current borrowings from English into Japanese and French and distinguishes between language as a vehicle of communication and as a symbol of cultural values. Finally, the chapter indicates the schizophrenic character of linguistic judgments about prescription and description and concludes with a characterization of current guidelines for nonsexist language use as sensible prescription.

Studies of social change and language maintenance and shift have tended to focus on minority immigrant languages (e.g., Fishman, 1991; Gal, 1979; Milroy, 2001; Stoessel, 2002). Very little is known about language shift from a demographically dominant language to a minority but economically dominant one (e.g., Bowerman, 2000; de Klerk, 2000; Kamwangamalu, 2001, 2002a,b, & in press; Reagan, 2001). This chapter contributes to such research by looking at the current language shift from majority African languages such as Sotho, Xhosa, and Zulu to English in South Africa. In particular, it examines to what extent the sociopolitical changes that have taken place in South Africa (i.e., the demise of apartheid and its attendant structures) have impacted everyday linguistic interaction and have contributed to language shift from the indigenous African languages to English, especially in urban Black communities. It argues that a number of factors, among them the economic value and international status of English, the perceived lower status of the indigenous African languages, the legacy of apartheid-based Bantu education, the new multilingual language policy, the linguistic behaviors of language policy makers, etc., interact in complex ways to accelerate language shift in urban Black communities. In conclusion, the chapter explores ways in which the observed language shift can be curbed to prevent what Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) has termed “linguistic genocide,” particularly in a country that has a well-documented history of this phenomenon (Lanham, 1978; Prabhakaran, 1998).

Various facets of the general topic of multilingualism, including language contact, have been dealt with in previous ARAL volumes (e.g., under separate entries in volumes 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 12, 13, and 15) and as a major substantive focus in volumes 6, 14 and 17. Nonetheless, it does not seem at all surprising that we return to the specific topic of language contact and change in volume 23 given the worldwide incidence of the phenomenon and the attention, and often controversy, which various aspects of language contact, language change or language loss arouses. Thus, I find it interesting that, within the past 12 months, issues related to language contact and derivative implications have surfaced as important factors in public discussions in such disparate settings as the November 2002 elections in several of the states in the United States, the admission of new members to the European Union, and immigration to Australia. Clearly, the topics of language contact and language change are salient and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.