Section 1 gives an operational definition of loanwords and exemplifies their categories. Section 2, on types of borrowing, distinguishes loanwords, which generally adapt to the recipient language’s system, from foreign words, which do not. There are one-source loanwords and hybrid loanwords (coming from two or more languages). Unlike one-language borrowing, chained borrowing passes through one or more intermediate languages. Borrowing via cultural influence and that due to geographical contacts are defined. Section 3 outlines main sources of borrowing: sources for Proto-Slavic, and sources for individual Slavic languages and their dialects. Section 4 outlines issues of phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic, and register/style adaptation. Section 5 discusses the lexical status of loanwords in Slavic; section 6, their sociolinguistic status. Purism dominated the lexicons of Slavic standard languages, especially those which had been under German-speaking rule. Section 7, on Slavic loanword research, focuses on ‘dictionaries of foreign words’, which are abundant and prominent in all Slavic cultures, while virtually unknown in English and other cultural traditions.

It is hardly surprising that contact-based influence on Arabic, with over 300 million native speakers spoken from Uzbekistan to Morocco to northeast Nigeria, has been important. This article walks through eight different historical and cultural stages of contact, beginning with the under-reported story of pre- and early Islamic Aramaic–Arabic contact. Emerging from the shadow of Aramaic to become the dominant language of the Middle East and southern Mediterranean, Arabic left behind interesting minorities in Andalusia (Spain), Malta, and Cyprus, each marked by special sources of influence from Romance languages and Greek, and in the case of Uzbekistan Arabic, pushed to the point of mixed language status by co-territorial Dari and Uzbek. In the Sudanic region, native varieties have undergone profound influence from co-territorial African languages – Kanuri influence is illustrated here – but only in specific domains of grammar. Elsewhere in Africa, contact has been so intense and so compressed that entirely new pidgin-creole varieties (Nubi/Juba Arabic) have emerged. Arabic-internal contact – inter-dialectal and Standard Arabic – constitutes a continuing dynamic within Arabic societies. Arabic represents an open challenge to general theories of contact – Dixon, van Coetsam, Labov – as important to the study of Arabic as to the study of linguistics.

The development of discourse markers is commonly believed to be a language-internal process. In this chapter it is demonstrated, however, that new discourse markers quite commonly also arise in situations of language contact. A range of borrowing processes are discussed, showing in particular that the borrowing process may extend across countries and continents. The Spanish discourse marker entonces "then, therefore, thus," for example, spread from Europe to Central and South America, Africa, and the Pacific Ocean area.