Contact is an important factor in language use, language maintenance, language variation, and language change. Language contact is contact between users of different languages. There is a diversity of approaches to language contact. Some researchers regard contact as primarily a socio-historical issue and investigate the various causes of contact between speaker groups; others focus on the structural aspects of specific contact phenomena such as lexical borrowing, pidgins and creoles, and contact induced linguistic change. The purpose of this essay is to provide an overview of language contact as a field of enquiry. It will first outline the key causes, processes and outcomes of language contact. It will then discuss the various theoretical and methodological approaches to language contact. Finally, it will outline the central issues of the pragmatics of language contact.