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Language “contact” and its impact on the dynamics of language are nowadays acknowledged facts. Questions relating to this topic no longer derive from marginal studies nor from the treatment of “special cases”: whether the issue is to understand the evolution of languages, their structural and material transformations, or simply to take account of their ordinary use, language contact is present.

Empirical works and theoretical developments have extended beyond the study of pidgins and creoles, the study of language practices in multilingual contexts, and the study of bilingualism in general.

Studies carried out during the last two decades on mixed languages and on areas of linguistic convergence, concepts proposed in order to grasp the processes active in such interactions, efforts at theorizing in order to comprehend the significance of language contact, and the appeal to knowledge outside the “linguistic sciences” have contributed to opening up new perspectives.

The same is true of the reference to biology and to Darwinian theories, whose suggestive power feeds several current orientations, social anthropological, social psychological, and ethnomethodological approaches which demonstrate their relevance to understanding the dynamics of language and linguistic representations, the fashioning of rules, the elaboration of norms of interaction, and the selection and transformation of forms in usage.

Cognitive, evolutionary, and social psychological relevance is thus found crucially at the heart of the problem of language contact and of the dynamics of language; it contributes to clarifying, redrawing, and rearranging the major aspects of these domains while also retaining the effects of the contextualization of phenomena, social dynamics, individual activity and individuals’ interpretative choice in the construction of norms and the elaboration of structures and use.

In parallel fashion, extensive research on language typology permits tracing in concrete form the map of linguistic phenomena – rare or common – in the world and furnishes the necessary basis for the development of empirically founded structural, cognitive, and evolutionary reflection

Finally, after a period when contact was considered a marginal phenomenon that could be ignored in theory construction, we have come to consider it as part of the reality of ordinary communication. Today, the question arises as to how far contact should be considered a constitutive phenomenon of the semiotic and structural elaboration of language. In other words as a phenomenon which, far from needing to be hidden, finishes by becoming explanatory and asks to be integrated into theory construction. In this restructured context, the question of contact finds its place in the center of reflection not only on the dynamics of language, but on language itself.