The book of Isaiah reflects many of the population movements that took place in the period of its formation. Much biblical scholarship focuses on “the (Babylonian) Exile,” but as C. L. Crouch points out in “Isaiah and Migration,” mass population movements were carried out in the sphere of Israel and Judah by the Assyrians long before the Babylonians overthrew Jerusalem. She also calls attention to the migrations experienced by other nations, and to forces of displacement other than deportation, such as warfare, famine, and natural disasters. She analyzes the literary reception of these numerous involuntary migrations, and the ways in which the prophet and his audiences made sense of them.

This chapter is about the evolution of language contact as a research area from the late nineteenth century to the present. It underscores the catalyst part that the discovery of creoles and pidgins by European philologists and other precursors of modern linguistics played in highlighting the roles of population movement and language contact as actuators of language change and speciation. It draws attention to the significance of the study of language evolution in European colonies in making evident the realities of language coexistence. These include the possible competition that can cause language shift and the death of one or some of the coexistent languages, a process that has affected competing European vernaculars faster than it has, for instance, Native American languages. It underscores the expansion of the field as linguists became interested in phenomena such as interference, codeswitching (or translanguaging), codemixing, diglossia, language diasporas, and linguistic areas, as well as factors that facilitate or favor the evolution of structures, sometimes of the same language, in divergent ways, owing to changes in population structures.

This chapter discusses how migration and trade as historical sociocultural processes have contributed to language spread and language contact situations in Latin America. It explores how language contact situations in Latin America have been dynamically created and changed by the movement of peoples and exchange of things and ideas through space and time, focusing on three kinds of linguistic outcomes: language spread, the emergence of multilingualism, and the development of contact languages. The discussion is framed by an interdisciplinary framework, focusing on the internal and external histories of indigenous languages of Latin America, from the initial peopling of the New World up to contemporary situations of language contact.