The sociolinguistic situation of the Channel Islands has meant that English has been spoken there alongside the native language, Norman, for several centuries, albeit in a diglossic relationship, with English assuming “High” functions (administration, legislation, education, media, and so forth) and Norman “Low” functions (familiar discourse with family and friends). The fact that, today, all speakers of the three extant varieties of Insular Norman (Jèrriais, Guernesiais, and Sercquiais) are also fluent in English has had far-reaching linguistic consequences in that the Norman spoken in the Channel Islands has diverged from the varieties spoken on the French mainland, and distinctive local varieties of Channel Island English have developed. Based on original data, this chapter provides an overview of the sociolinguistic setting that gave rise to this language contact and discusses some representative examples of contact-induced influence in the lexis, phonology, and morphosyntax of both Channel Island Norman and Channel Island English.

Urban contact dialects emerged in urban settings among locally born young people and can serve as markers of a new, multiethnic urban identity. The chapter brings together instances of such dialects from Europe and Africa, two regions where these phenomena have received a lot of attention from contact-linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. In both settings, local contexts for urban contact dialects are characterised by an openness to multilingual practices. In African contexts, this multilingual perspective is usually also present at the macro level of the larger society; in Europe, the societal context is generally characterized by a more monolingual (and monoethnic) habitus. The comparative perspective adopted here shows that these differences in macro context support different structural and sociolinguistic outcomes, including contact-induced and contact-facilitated change; urban contact dialects taking the form of multilingual mixed languages or new vernaculars of a national majority language; the possible spread of these dialects to become general markers of youth or modernity; and negative public perceptions involving different language-ideological patterns.

As a new immigrant to Canada, Marie-Paule Lory lived the popular “Canadian experience,” including learning and working with English-speaking researchers. Her vision of multilingualism in Ontario is to address the "threat" to the sustainability of the French language while taking the risk of changing teacher practices in multilingual classrooms.

David Little learned French and German in the UK in a monolingual environment. His research quickly focused on the agency of the learners. Having worked with refugees and then with multilingual schools, involving many languages in the classroom, he rejects translanguaging. Rather, he suggests that collaborative learning tasks should be carried out with different languages in mind.