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The Romance languages have been involved in many situations of language contact. While language contact is evident at all levels, the most visible effects on the system of the recipient language concern the lexicon. The relationship between language contact and the lexicon raises some theoretical issues that are not always adequately addressed, including in etymological lexicography. First is the very notion of what constitutes “language contact.” Contrary to a somewhat dated view, language contact does not necessarily imply physical presence, contemporaneity, and orality: as far as the lexicon is concerned, contact can happen over time and space, particularly through written media. Depending on the kind of extralinguistic circumstances at stake, language contact can be induced by diverse factors, leading to different forms of borrowing. The misleading terms borrowings or loans mask the reality that these are actually adapted imitations—whether formal, semantic, or both—of a foreign model. Likewise, the common Latin or Greek origins of a huge proportion of the Romance lexicon often obscure the real history of words. As these classical languages have contributed numerous technical and scientific terms, as well as a series of “roots,” words coined in one Romance language can easily be reproduced in any other. However, simply reducing a word’s etymology to the origin of its components (classic or otherwise), ignoring intermediate stages and possibly intermediating languages in the borrowing process, is a distortion of word history. To the extent that it is useful to refer to “internationalisms,” related words in different Romance languages merit careful, often arduous research in the process of identifying the actual origin of a given coining. From a methodological point of view, it is crucial to distinguish between the immediate lending language and the oldest stage that can be identified, with the former being more relevant in a rigorous approach to comparative historical lexicology. Concrete examples from Ibero-Romania, Gallo-Romania, Italo-Romania, and Balkan-Romania highlight the variety of different Romance loans and reflect the diverse historical factors particular to each linguistic community in which borrowing occurred.

Since the start of the Islamic conquest of the Maghreb in the 7th century ce, Berber and Arabic have been in continual contact. This has led to large-scale mutual influence. The sociolinguistic setting of this influence is not the same, though; Arabic influence on Berber is found in a situation of language maintenance with widespread bilingualism, while Berber influence on Arabic is no doubt to a large degree due to language shift by Berber speakers to Arabic. Linguistic influence is found on all levels: phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. In those cases where only innovative patterns are shared between the two language groups, it is often difficult to make out where the innovation started; thus the great similarities in syllable structure between Maghrebian Arabic and northern Berber are the result of innovations within both language families, and it is difficult to tell where it started. Morphological influence seems to be mediated exclusively by lexical borrowing. Especially in Berber, this has led to parallel systems in the morphology, where native words always have native morphology, while loans either have nativized morphology or retain Arabic-like patterns. In the lexicon, it is especially Berber that takes over scores of loanwords from Arabic, amounting in one case to over one-third of the basic lexicon as defined by 100-word lists.

The Raeto-Romance varieties, which are spoken in noncontiguous areas reaching from the Grison Alps in Switzerland to the Italian Adriatic coast near the Slovenian border, are characterized by considerable differences from one another at the lexical level. Hence, when describing the Raeto-Romance lexicon, it is important to pay particular attention to which lexical types occur in which main varieties (i.e., in Romansh of Grisons, Dolomitic Ladin and Friulian, secondarily also in subvarieties). The mentioned spatial perspective intersects the chronological perspective that aims at presenting the components of different origin entering the Raeto-Romance varieties in different periods. The pre-Roman lexicon is of rather small extent and contains especially terms of flora, fauna, terrain, farming, tools, and equipment. Within the Latin stratum, the lexicon inherited from late Latin, Romance formations (on the basis of elements of Latin origin) and borrowings from Latin have to be distinguished. All Raeto-Romance varieties have numerous borrowings from Germanic varieties. Early Germanic elements already entered late Latin and are present in Raeto-Romance as well as in the neighboring Romance varieties. Borrowings taking place in different periods of the Middle Ages and the Modern Era as well as borrowings from different regional varieties of German are often marked phonetically. Romansh of Grisons has borrowings from Alemannic dialects; however, its most eastern varieties are also characterized by borrowings from Tyrolean, which belongs to the Bavarian dialects. Dolomitic Ladin has been exposed to the influence of Tyrolean. In Friuli, there was a period of German influence from the Bavarian area in the Middle Ages, followed by a period of orientation toward Venetan, and later toward Italian as well. In Grisons and in the Dolomites, the influence of Italian dialects and Italian characterizes to a higher degree the southern varieties (i.e., Vallader and Puter, subsumed in Engadinese [Grisons], as well as Fascian, Fodom, and Anpezan [Dolomites]). In contrast, more numerous borrowings from German distinguish the northern varieties (i.e., Surselvan, Sutselvan, and Surmiran [Grisons] as well as Badiot and Gardenese [Dolomites]). A component characterizing exclusively Friulian is a borrowing from neighboring Slovene.

As might be expected from the difficulty of traversing it, the Sahara Desert has been a fairly effective barrier to direct contact between its two edges; trans-Saharan language contact is limited to the borrowing of non-core vocabulary, minimal from south to north and mostly mediated by education from north to south. Its own inhabitants, however, are necessarily accustomed to travelling desert spaces, and contact between languages within the Sahara has often accordingly had a much greater impact. Several peripheral Arabic varieties of the Sahara retain morphology as well as vocabulary from the languages spoken by their speakers’ ancestors, in particular Berber in the southwest and Beja in the southeast; the same is true of at least one Saharan Hausa variety. The Berber languages of the northern Sahara have in turn been deeply affected by centuries of bilingualism in Arabic, borrowing core vocabulary and some aspects of morphology and syntax. The Northern Songhay languages of the central Sahara have been even more profoundly affected by a history of multilingualism and language shift involving Tuareg, Songhay, Arabic, and other Berber languages, much of which remains to be unraveled. These languages have borrowed so extensively that they retain barely a few hundred core words of Songhay vocabulary; those loans have not only introduced new morphology but in some cases replaced old morphology entirely. In the southeast, the spread of Arabic westward from the Nile Valley has created a spectrum of varieties with varying degrees of local influence; the Saharan ones remain almost entirely undescribed. Much work remains to be done throughout the region, not only on identifying and analyzing contact effects but even simply on describing the languages its inhabitants speak.

Typologically, pitch-accent languages stand between stress languages like Spanish and tone languages like Shona, and share properties of both. In a stress language, typically just one syllable per word is accented and bears the major stress (cf. Spanish sábana ‘sheet,’ sabána ‘plain,’ panamá ‘Panama’). In a tone language, the number of distinctions grows geometrically with the size of the word. So in Shona, which contrasts high versus low tone, trisyllabic words have eight possible pitch patterns. In a canonical pitch-accent language such as Japanese, just one syllable (or mora) per word is singled out as distinctive, as in Spanish. Each syllable in the word is assigned a high or low tone (as in Shona); however, this assignment is predictable based on the location of the accented syllable. The Korean dialects spoken in the southeast Kyengsang and northeast Hamkyeng regions retain the pitch-accent distinctions that developed by the period of Middle Korean (15th–16th centuries). For example, in Hamkyeng a three-syllable word can have one of four possible pitch patterns, which are assigned by rules that refer to the accented syllable. The accented syllable has a high tone, and following syllables have low tones. Then the high tone of the accented syllable spreads up to the initial syllable, which is low. Thus, /MUcike/ ‘rainbow’ is realized as high-low-low, /aCImi/ ‘aunt’ is realized as low-high-low, and /menaRI/ ‘parsley’ is realized as low-high-high. An atonic word such as /cintallɛ/ ‘azalea’ has the same low-high-high pitch pattern as ‘parsley’ when realized alone. But the two types are distinguished when combined with a particle such as /MAN/ ‘only’ that bears an underlying accent: /menaRI+MAN/ ‘only parsely’ is realized as low-high-high-low while /cintallɛ+MAN/ ‘only azelea’ is realized as low-high-high-high. This difference can be explained by saying that the underlying accent on the particle is deleted if the stem bears an accent. The result is that only one syllable per word may bear an accent (similar to Spanish). On the other hand, since the accent is realized with pitch distinctions, tonal assimilation rules are prevalent in pitch-accent languages. This article begins with a description of the Middle Korean pitch-accent system and its evolution into the modern dialects, with a focus on Kyengsang. Alternative synchronic analyses of the accentual alternations that arise when a stem is combined with inflectional particles are then considered. The discussion proceeds to the phonetic realization of the contrasting accents, their realizations in compounds and phrases, and the adaptation of loanwords. The final sections treat the lexical restructuring and variable distribution of the pitch accents and their emergence from predictable word-final accent in an earlier stage of Proto-Korean.

The rigor and intensity of investigation on Japanese in modern linguistics has been particularly noteworthy over the past 50 years. Not only has the elucidation of the similarities to and differences from other languages properly placed Japanese on the typological map, but Japanese has served as a critical testing area for a wide variety of theoretical approaches. Within the sub-fields of Japanese phonetics and phonology, there has been much focus on the role of mora. The mora constitutes an important timing unit that has broad implications for analysis of the phonetic and phonological system of Japanese. Relatedly, Japanese possesses a pitch-accent system, which places Japanese in a typologically distinct group arguably different from stress languages, like English, and tone languages, like Chinese. A further area of intense investigation is that of loanword phonology, illuminating the way in which segmental and suprasegmental adaptations are processed and at the same time revealing the fundamental nature of the sound system intrinsic to Japanese. In morphology, a major focus has been on compounds, which are ubiquitously found in Japanese. Their detailed description has spurred in-depth discussion regarding morphophonological (e.g., Rendaku—sequential voicing) and morphosyntactic (e.g., argument structure) phenomena that have crucial consequences for morphological theory. Rendaku is governed by layers of constraints that range from segmental and prosodic phonology to structural properties of compounds, and serves as a representative example in demonstrating the intricate interaction of the different grammatical aspects of the language. In syntax, the scrambling phenomenon, allowing for the relatively flexible permutation of constituents, has been argued to instantiate a movement operation and has been instrumental in arguing for a configurational approach to Japanese. Japanese passives and causatives, which are formed through agglutinative morphology, each exhibit different types: direct vs. indirect passives and lexical vs. syntactic causatives. Their syntactic and semantic properties have posed challenges to and motivations for a variety of approaches to these well-studied constructions in the world’s languages. Taken together, the empirical analyses of Japanese and their theoretical and conceptual implications have made a tremendous contribution to linguistic research.