Historically, language contact has taken place under conditions of trade, imported slave and contract labor, military service, conquest, colonialism, migration, and urbanization. The linguistic outcomes are determined in large part by the social relations among populations — including economic, political, and demographic factors — and by the duration of contact. In some times and places, interactions between linguistically heterogeneous groups have generated (depending on one’s theoretical orientation) new languages or radically different language varieties. This article examines the formation of contact languages — understood here primarily as pidgins, creoles, and bilingual mixed languages — the history of which involves a Germanic language in a significant way.

The empirical focus of this chapter are heritage Germanic languages spoken in North America. Heritage languages are the first language of individuals who speak a language at home that is not the dominant language of the larger society (pace Rothman 2009). Unlike minority languages (see Louden, Chapter 34), speakers of heritage varieties of Germanic are not tied to a particular religious group. Additionally, the majority of these heritage speakers speak moribund vernaculars. Here we review the general properties of the phonology, morphology and morpho-syntax, syntax, and semantics and pragmatics of heritage German and Norwegian. We discuss the impact that these empirical findings have on theoretical analyses, include language attrition and the potential of incomplete mastery of elements of the heritage language.