Summary

Language contact highlights the social dynamics that are crucial to understanding language change and the emergence of linguistic variation and complexity over time. As an analytic approach and field of linguistic anthropological inquiry, it reminds us that the study of language cannot be separated from an in-depth understanding of the social context of contact, highlighting the need to center the analysis of human social practices, interactional dynamics, and broader ideological frameworks in any inquiry of linguistic and social change. Understanding these social processes requires us to think less about individual linguistic forms and more about the range of communicative practices that emerge in zones of language contact. Because linguistic and communicative praxis are another form of social action, attention to the social dynamics of contact—which include the cultural contingencies of contact between speakers of different linguistic varieties, the interactions that emerge and constitute the context of contact, and the ideological frameworks that shape these interactions—are equally important in shaping language change and linguistic complexity over time. Foregrounding the social and cultural aspects of language contact also complicates assumptions around the boundedness of languages. Privileging speaker’s orientations and understandings of their contact-influenced linguistic practices can challenge views of language as a bounded, discrete object or as a system of meaning-making that is disembodied from a social context.