<P><EM>The Routledge Handbook of Language Contact</EM> provides an overview of the state of the art of current research in contact linguistics. Presenting contact linguistics as an established field of investigation in its own right and featuring 26 chapters, this handbook brings together a broad range of approaches to contact linguistics, including:</P><UL><P><LI>experimental and observational approaches and formal theories;</LI><P></P><P><LI>a focus on social and cognitive factors that impact the outcome of language contact situations and bilingual language processing;</LI><P></P><P><LI>the emergence of new languages and speech varieties in contact situations, and contact linguistic phenomena in urban speech and linguistic landscapes. </LI><P></P></UL><P>With contributions from an international range of leading and emerging scholars in their fields, the four sections of this text deal with methodological and theoretical approaches, the factors that condition and shape language contac