[German version]

Language contact (LC) occurs when two or more languages, usually geographical neighbours, collide through the mixing of the respective speaker communities, making communication across the language boundaries necessary or possible. A typical phenomenon of intensive LC is bilingualism, in which individual speakers have sufficient mastery of two (or more) languages and use them alternately ( Multilingualism), not to be confused with diglossia which refers to the change between different language strata and is regarded as a separate subject of linguisti…