This chapter begins by outlining the history and development of Yiddish, the traditional vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, and it discusses how Yiddish went from being a vibrant language spoken by millions to being an endangered minority language with only a fraction of its original speaker population – primarily as a result of the Holocaust. The chapter explains how Yiddish came to be spoken in Britain from the 1880s onwards, when large numbers of Ashkenazim fled there to escape poverty and pogroms, and it details the initial tensions and subsequent cooperation between different waves and generations of Yiddish-speaking newcomers (which entailed shifting attitudes towards the Yiddish language). The chapter then provides an overview of the past and current geographical distribution of Yiddish-speaking communities in Britain, with a focus on the main urban centres, and it explores especially London’s thriving Yiddish culture between the two World Wars. This is followed by a discussion of the linguistic consequences of contact between Yiddish and English speakers, and particularly borrowings from each language into the other. Throughout, differences are explained regarding the language use and intergenerational transmission patterns of Yiddish among Haredi as compared to secular communities.

The Chinese are one of the longest established and largest immigrant groups in Britain. There are a number of mutually unintelligible regional languages that are spoken amongst the Chinese. A complex pattern of multilingualism is emerging in the community. Intergenerational language maintenance and language shift are key sociolinguistic issues that the communites are collectively addressing. Contacts between the different languages have resulted in structural innovation and change that impact on all the languages concerned.

To explain Latinization of the Roman West, scholars have long searched for evidence of a language policy mandating the use of Latin. They have found none under the Principate. The Roman centre was not interested in policies involving all its subjects, and elite Romans were uninterested in languages other than Latin and Greek and had no concerns about their use, as long as the Empire’s functioning remained intact. Indeed, it is not clear that any such policy would have made much sense for provincials in illiterate and translingual environments. However, though there may not have been an Empire-wide policy of Latinization, there were certainly language ideologies and multiple narrowly focused facets of language management concerning the use of Latin and Greek in the running of the Empire.

The term revitalization presupposes that something is in danger or threatened – as a consequence, language revitalization is often seen as a response to language endangerment and as a way of undoing past injustices. While revitalization processes take place in the present, such processes follow long timescales and are deeply embedded in local historical contexts. Language revitalization may be experienced as positive and emancipatory, but the process can also be difficult because those attempting to reclaim their language may have to face hurts of the past, which have been passed down through generations and have consequences today. An analysis of current efforts to revitalize Kven and Sámi languages in Northern Norway sheds light on such inherent tensions in revitalization processes, concluding that it is essential to recognize tensions and contradictory forces exerted on the individuals who attempt to reclaim their language and to support them on their language journey.

Medieval and classical periods in African history are a particular focus of this survey of language contact patterns seen on the African continent. The effects of languages associated with empires and kingdoms are shown to vary widely, with many such languages remaining influential even in the present day. Disentangling earlier patterns of language contact is a necessary step for those interested in reconstructing and classifying African languages. The great time depth and diversity found within each of the major African language phyla is mirrored by a dizzying array of contact patterns both within and across these phyla.

Five-hundred years ago, Europeans finally “discovered” Malay, the undisputed language of Southeast Asian commerce and diplomacy of that time. In this chapter, we look into the role of Malay in the early modern era so we can understand the processes that have contributed to its continued diffusion and diversification in this century. We look at the spread of Malay, not by mass migration, but through language convergence and language shift. Malay, whether a national language (named Malay and Indonesian) or a local dialect spoken by a small ethnic minority, is one of the world’s major languages. Its geographic and demographic expansion can be linked to numerous factors, among them: language shift as a component of broader cultural change; consolidation of diverse ethnicities; immigrant accommodation to the majority population; and early use in national educational systems. But the underlying basis and strength of Malay is its centuries old geographic and societal diffusion. On the one hand, its national-language status has triggered the significant growth we are witnessing now. On the other hand, the creativity of its speakers using diverse social and regional dialects sustains that growth, reflected in its large profile in today’s electronic media, such as Facebook.

Continental West Germanic and North Germanic languages have been spoken in the Americas for several hundred years, and many are alive as heritage languages today, though often used only by elderly speakers. This chapter examines these languages from several perspectives. First, we look at social and historical contexts of bilingualism. Second, we describe the varieties used, e.g., the extent to which people knew a standard language, along with associated language attitudes and ideologies. Third, we look at key structural properties of Germanic heritage languages with examples from phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, and the lexicon, revealing parallels in development and change across languages. Finally, we note some patterns and language maintenance and shift.

This chapter surveys the historical background of the global spread of English and its linguistic consequences. Since World Englishes are mostly products of colonialism, it surveys the history of European colonization and colonization types, the growth and decline of the British Empire, and the role of the United States in the globalization of English. It discusses the tension between the internationalization and the localization of English, the range of variety types which have consequently grown in specific circumstances; and offers numbers of varieties and speakers involved, including a global map of countries in which English has some sort of a special internal status. It is shown that, surprisingly, the global growth of English gained even more momentum after the end of the colonial period. The constant leitmotif in all of this is the relationship between the language-external and the internal, the direct functional relationship between historical events and constellations, the communicative patterns caused by these, and, consequently, their effects upon the development of linguistic forms and varieties.

This chapter centers on the sociolinguistic situation of Germanic languages spoken in minority communities around the world. Following a descriptive typology formulated by a geographer (White 1987) and a social psychologist (Edwards 1992, 2004), 21 Germanic minority languages are analyzed with an eye to understanding which external factors promote their maintenance or lead to a shift to a majority language. Special attention is paid to the most successful cases of minority language maintenance, which are found in highly traditional Anabaptist Christian and orthodox Jewish communities. The Germanic heritage languages of these groups are not only surviving, they are growing at rates not matched by any other language, large or small, in the world.

This chapter examines the evidence of language shifts to English in post-apartheid South Africa. We first present a brief overview of the language situation in South Africa and offer a review of the literature on language shift. A number of scholars have expressed concern that the maintenance of language diversity in South Africa is threatened by the dominance of English in schooling and the economy. However, other studies find that despite an increased use of English, mother-tongue languages have retained their cultural value as languages of identification. Moreover, recent quantitative work shows that among Africans the increased use of English is associated primarily with an increase in bilingualism rather than with the displacement of Bantu languages by English. We add to this literature with an analysis of Population Census data from 1996 to 2011 to investigate possible language shift from Afrikaans to English, particularly among Coloureds. We show that, despite a small decline in the use of Afrikaans as L1 and a corresponding rise in the use of English, the overall use of Afrikaans increased, because of the considerable growth in English–Afrikaans bilingualism.

Recent discussions around the genesis of varieties of English have posed the question of whether there are certain types which in principle form a typological class (e.g. creoles). Relatively little attention has been paid to shift varieties of English, which in terms of the sociolinguistics of language contact and development form a distinct group. When a group shifts to a language it is in contact with, features can be transferred into a new variety of that language which, if maintained by later generations, form a new, focused variety of the target language.

This chapter explores the consequences on isiXhosa of its long contact with the socio-politically dominant English language. It is shown that after nearly two centuries of English hegemony isiXhosa speakers have become increasingly bilingual in English and regularly switch between English and isiXhosa in their daily conversations. This in turn has led to heavy borrowing from English into isiXhosa. Based on code-switching data drawn from twenty naturally occurring conversations recorded in Gauteng and the Eastern Cape, the chapter reveals that English prepositions occur regularly in isiXhosa speech, including in contexts that would easily qualify as isiXhosa monolingual speech. The occurrence of these English closed-class items in isiXhosa spaces suggests that English has or is about to penetrate the grammatical structure of isiXhosa. The findings of this study point to a possible weakening of isiXhosa grammatical structure under heavy pressure from the more dominant English language.