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The past decade has seen an unprecedented growth in the study of language contact, associated partly with the linguistic effects of globalization and increased migration all over the world. Written by a leading expert in the field, this much-needed account brings together disparate findings to examine the dynamics of contact between languages in an immigrant context. Using data from a wide range of languages, including German, Dutch, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Croatian and Vietnamese, Michael Clyne discusses the dynamics of their contact with English. Clyne analyzes how and why these languages change in an immigration country like Australia, and asks why some languages survive longer than others. The book contains useful comparisons between immigrant vintages, generations, and between bilinguals and trilinguals. An outstanding contribution to the study of language contact, this book will be welcomed by students and researchers in linguistics, bilingualism, the sociology of language and education.

Recently constraints on code switching have been postulated in studies using and/or justifying particular theoretical frameworks. This paper examines the constraints -structural integrity, free morpheme, government, semantic -and the notion of the 'matrix language'. It also looks at assumptions underlying the constraints -stability and 'sfandardness' of grammatical systems in contact, grammatically, the inclusion of trigger words as par t of the switch. It tests the constraints and their assumptions against a sizeable corpus derived from German-English and Dutch-English bilinguals in Australia (languages in contact not represented in the studies under consideration). The basic assumptions are found wanting. Syntactic convergence between the individual's language systems, which are not necessarily stable or standard, facilitates code switching and is sometimes necessary for some constraints to be valid. There is evidence that trigger words are not part of the switch, and our corpus points to shortcomings of the 'matrix language' notion. Although most constraints are GENERALLY supported, there is also evidence against most of them. The data suggests that switching sites are surface-structure phenomena.

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