This is the homepage of the Commission on Language Contact under the auspices of the International Congress of Slavists. It was convened for its four-year term under the chairmanship of Björn Wiemer (Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität, Institut für Slavistik, Turkologie und zirkumbaltische Studien) and is constituted by a team of international Slavic scholars.
Slavic non-standard varieties (dialects, sociolects, exogeneous and endogenous minority languages, etc.) offer a wide range of hitherto poorly utilized opportunities that supply important resources for the investigation of language contact, both between varieties of Slavic and between Slavic and non-Slavic varieties. In addition, Slavic varieties are involved in diverse contact situations, offering manifold objects of research not only in diatopic, but also in diastratic dimensions (in Coseriu’s terms). This empirical background provides an opportunity to document and describe various contact situations which complement our knowledge of linguistic diversity from a sociolinguistic and structural point of view, as well as offers possibilities to make significant contributions to theoretical approaches, fostering a better understanding and explanation of language change.