Series editor’s foreword

Summary

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.