Language Contact and Language Decay: Socio-political and linguistic perspectives

This volume presents the proceedings of the first Workshop organized by the Postgraduate Research Centre LETiSS (Lingue d¹Europa: Tipologia, Storia e Sociolinguistica ­ Languages of Europe: Typology, History and Sociolinguistics), specifically dedicated to the linguistic situation of Europe, approached from a variety of perspectives. The massive immigration wave of the last fifty years has deeply changed the linguistic constellation of Europe, leading to the formation of alloglottic communities more or less integrated in the local, social, and sociolinguistic fabric: because of these reasons, LETiSS has chosen to deepen the study of European languages according to the three dimensions announced in its acronym. The Centre wants to create a reference point for research on the linguistic dynamics of Europe and favor international cooperation, especially by gathering young researchers from many different countries and different cultural as well as linguistic traditions: workshops and spring schools should lead to establish new research networks as an outcome of these fruitful interactions between European and non-European researchers. The papers collected in the present volume deal with the manifold subject of language death and endangered languages following two thematic areas, namely sociocultural-political conditions of endangered languages, and linguistic phenomena associated with the decay and death of a language.