Chapter 1 Introduction: Contact-related variation and change – crossing the boundaries within and between languages

The chapter deals with language contact, language variation and change and highlights the relationship between language boundaries and language contact and between the latter and language variation and possible subsequent change. Language contact may (contribute to) trigger variation within a language, detectable on the synchronic axis, and the latter, over time – i.e., diachronically –, may yield to changes such as, e.g., grammaticalisation.