ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys a broad region that encompasses South Asia, Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia, as well as southern China. We look at past aspects of language contact throughout the history of the region, especially in relation to maritime as well as land trade routes. We give examples of three different ecologies of language contact, namely Sri Lanka, Melaka, and Macau, as exemplifications of South, Southeast, and East Asia respectively, and address central, instructive contact phenomena in each context. We round off the account by exploring new contact scenarios, dynamics, and outcomes of the twenty-first century.
