ABSTRACT
The integration of studies of “languages in contact” into the field of sociolinguistics has been gradual. The seminal sociolinguistic literature of the 1960s and 1970s (Bright 1966; Lieberson 1967; Giglioli 1972) did not include chapters or monographic studies on languages in contact. Some attention was paid to the situation of certain bilingual communities, but always from a sociological per - spective. Scholarly attention to language contact started to become more systematic in the specialty manuals of the mid-1970s. Trudgill (1974) deals with Pidgins and Creoles in a chapter called “Language and Geography.” Hudson (1980) includes pidgins and creoles among language varieties, and Wardhaugh (1986) addresses code mixing and language alternation. Currently, all of the most important manuals of this specialty area give due attention to the principal dimensions of linguistic contact, regardless of whether the perspective taken is more introductory (Coulmas 1997; Meyerhoff 2006), more communicative (Coulmas 2005) or more variationist (Chambers, Trudgill and Schilling-Estes 2002; Milroy and Gordon 2003; Bayley, Cameron and Lucas 2013). In addition, there is a large and ever growing literature on bilingualism and language contact (Hickey 2013). Sociolinguistic literature published in Spanish or about the Hispanic world has given special attention to language contact, from the earliest handbooks (López Morales 1989; SilvaCorvalán 1989), to more recent ones (Almeida 1999; Blas Arroyo 2005; MorenoFernández 2009a; Serrano 2011; Díaz-Campos 2011, 2014; Silva-Corvalán and Enrique-Arias 2016). The incorporation of a cognitive approach into the field of sociolinguistics provides yet one more reason to consider the study of languages in contact a priority.
