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 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 Umberto Ansaldo's Contact Languages: Ecology and Evolution in Asia. This is, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive account to date of ‘contact language formation’ in Monsoon Asia, including Sri Lanka, the Malaysian-Indonesian region, and Southern China. Providing a rich socio-economic history of layers of colonization of various kinds in the region, by Asians and Europeans alike, the book sheds light on the spread of indigenous languages such as Malay and Chinese, which, incidentally, have not developed identical ethnographic functions in the new geographical spaces of their expansion. It articulates clearly the relevant ecological factors that favoured both the geographical expansion of some languages indigenous to Asia and the emergence of new varieties such as Bazaar, Baba, and Cocos Malay, especially the ‘city-ports’ in relation to which the actual agents of these particular…