Series editor's foreword

Summary

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 The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact by Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews, a most authoritative book that combines the latest scholarship on language contact and child language development in a multilingual setting. It has the distinction of being based on the most extensive longitudinal database on the subject matter to date, involving a relatively large population of children studied over a long period of time, and contributing to the relevant research areas insights from an examination of typologically and genetically quite unrelated languages: Cantonese and English. Three of the protagonists are the authors' own children, whose speech constitutes the core and largest part of the database.