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It has been observed on many occasions that Chinese changed greatly since the turn of the century, especially during the last 30 years, perhaps more rapidly and more profoundly than any other one of the principal world languages. The changes led to the birth of a branch of Chinese linguistics specifically concerned with them, and beside numerous textbooks and dictionaries, there appeared a voluminous series of studies dedicated exclusively to their description. Chi Wen-shun, the compiler of one of the dictionaries, noted the feeling of having become illiterate on the part of an educated Chinese émigré reading thePeople's Daily, while others, including the present author, have gone so far as to speak of Chinese as a divided language, in a sense similar to that of a divided country in the political sphere.

The goals of this paper are to examine several aspects oflanguage contact involving languages of the Chaco region. More specifically,I discuss changes that are unexpected in situations of intensive contact; Iconsider possible explanations for resistance to lexical borrowing; I addressthe implications of language contact in these Chaco languages for claims aboutchange in language contact situations in general; I evaluate claims regardingmixed languages in the region; and I investigate diffused linguistic traits in theChaco and determine whether the Chaco is a linguistic area.

Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors, Volume 2. William Labov. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. 572 pp.

AbstractSpeed of linguistic change is not constant: it differs as between different language and dialects, and between different chronological periods. These differences are, at least to some extent, conditioned by social parameters. Two major social factors are involved in producing these different rates of linguistic change. There is, first, the role of the relative degree of contact versus isolation which speech communities have experienced: a good example is provided by the contrast between Faroese and Icelandic as opposed to the continental Scandinavian languages. There is, secondly, an important role for relative social stability versus social instability in the histories of communities. There is considerable evidence to suggest that conservative language varieties generally tend to be the ones which are relatively more geographically isolated than rapid-change varieties, as well as being relatively more stable as this paper illustrates, through a study of the linguistic consequences of social upheavals involving different historical periods, different continents, and different languages.

Abstract
This issue of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics aims to contribute to our understanding of language change in real time by presenting a group of articles particularly focused on social and sociocultural factors underlying language diversification and change. By analysing data from a varied set of languages, including Greek, English, and the Finnic and Mongolic language families, and mainly focussing their investigation on the Middle Ages, the authors connect various social and cultural factors with the specific topic of the issue, the rate of linguistic change. The sociolinguistic themes addressed include community and population size, conflict and conquest, migration and mobility, bi- and multilingualism, diglossia and standardization. In this introduction, the field of comparative historical sociolinguistics is considered a cross-disciplinary enterprise with a sociolinguistic agenda at the crossroads of contact linguistics, historical comparative linguistics and linguistic typology.

The metrical requirements of Persian poetry are highly restrictive. Traditionally, the rigidity of the metrical system was compensated for by a high degree of flexibility in the poetic language in terms of lexicon, phonology, and morpho-syntax. Using statistical data from different periods of Persian poetry, this paper argues that the degree of flexibility of the language used in metrical Persian poetry has been in constant decrease, moving towards what may potentially be a language crisis for metrical Persian poetry. This study traces the linguistic and meta-linguistic origins of the initial flexibility of the poetic language and its subsequent change, suggesting that some of the recent trends in Persian poetry may be viewed in part as reactions to this potential crisis.

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