This volume highlights various aspects of the theory and application of language contact and language conflict phenomena seen from an interdisciplinary perspective. The focus is on the linguistic, social, psychological, and educational issues (conditions, constraints, and consequences) involved in the status and use of languages in multilingual settings. The book is divided into four sections. The first section addresses theoretical issues such as the nature of the concepts of language maintenance, language loyalty and language identity, language shift, language loss and language death. It includes the search for models of the often contradictory theoretical issues involved in language contact. The second section examines the various language policies carried out by official agencies and focuses on the two basic options available to a multilingual nation: assimilation or pluralism. Section three gives an overview of research into determinants of language attitudes, the methods for the measurements of attitudes, as well as the relationship between language policy and attitude change. The fourth section examines the linguistic, social, psychological, and anthropological implications of using two different codes from different perspectives, such as the situational uses of code-switching, linguistic and social constraints on codeswitching, and code-switching vs. borrowing. A further research paradigm deals with the search for relativized constraints, resulting from the interaction of universal principles and aspects particular to each codeswitching situation.