Abstract The chapter starts with a short history of contact studies related to Africa. It briefly looks at early works from Heine (pidgins in the Bantu area) and the French tradition exemplified in the LACITO series on language contact. Considerable space is given to the developments of the last ten years or so when areal linguistics (Aikhenvald and Dixon), linguistic geography (Heine and Nurse), and contact linguistics (Childs, Mesthrie) were put center stage in the African linguistic context. The second part of the chapter looks at methodological issues. Substantial space is given to social contexts in the description of contact-induced language change. The social network approach and other sociolinguistic tools are demonstrated by means of a brief case study from a West African rural contact zone.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 88 citations exist upstream.