Abstract
This chapter1 contains an overview of the individual cases scrutinized in the volume through the lens of the current theory of contact linguistics. The notions of language maintenance and language shift, language dominance (with the emphasis on the so-called “balanced language contact” situation) will be discussed along with the sorts of linguistic consequences that result from processes of contact. These, in turn, include the different types of transfer phenomena (matter and pattern borrowings) and code switching. This chapter has two interrelated goals: to analyse the cases considered in this book from the point of view of contact linguistics, and to speculate about the instructiveness of these cases for a clearer understanding of the contact processes which have led to the creation and development of the Balkan language area.
