ABSTRACT
With The Routledge Handbook of Language Contact, this chapter aims to provide an overview of the state of the art of current research into contact linguistics. It presents contact linguistics as an established field of investigation in its own right, rather than (just) the application of general linguistic methods to data sets that represent contact. The Handbook brings together themes that are of interest to language typology and historical linguistics as well as to sociolinguistics and conversation and discourse analysis. The chapter highlights how similar circumstances give rise both to language mixing at the individual level and to the reshaping of language through contact, and how in turn the various outcomes of contact derive from a shared set of factors. It also presents the wide array of contact phenomena as an integrated package. From an epistemological point of view, the chapter represents the need to take a variety of factors into consideration when assessing all different outcomes of contact.
