Rethinking Languages in Contact: The Case of Italian

Taking as its theme the interaction between Italian and other languages, and marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Weinreich's seminal work Languages in Contact, this volume provides an up-to-date survey of the role of linguistic and cultural interaction in the process of language change. The range of contributions covers theoretical issues; phenomena of languages in contact in Medieval and Renaissance Italy; dialect transition and diversity in the North and in the South of Italy; lexical and morphological borrowings; register and syntactic loans in the Romance area; old and new contact varieties of Italian in the Mediterranean, including Malta and North Africa; and, finally, Italian under pressure from English in EU institutions. The volume is published in memory of Joseph Cremona, and includes a bibliography of his work.