This book is an innovative contribution to contact linguistics as it presents a rarely studied
but sizeable diaspora language community in contact with five languages ¿ English German
Italian Norwegian and Spanish ¿ across four continents. Foregrounded by diachronic
descriptions of heritage Croatian in long-standing minority communities the book presents
synchronically based studies of the speech of different generations of diaspora speakers.
Croatian offers excellent scope as a base language to examine how lexical and morpho-structural
innovations occur in a highly inflective Slavic language where external influence from Germanic
and Romance languages appears evident. The possibility of internal factors is also addressed
and interpretive models of language change are drawn on. With a foreword by Sarah Thomason
University of Michigan
