More than any other European language English has been shaped by its contacts with other languages such as Celtic, Latin, Scandinavian and French. This is true not only of the vocabulary, but also of morphology and even phonology and syntax. But also the contact between different varieties of English played an important role, especially in the shaping of the Englishes outside England. The papers contained in this volume deal with such contacts from various points of views. Major topics are: the restructuring of lexical fields by borrowing processes in Old, Middle and Early Modern English, the influence of Scandinavian on the morphology, the influence of Latin on English syntax, the development of Middle English verse meter under Italian influence, the origin of spelling conventions, the role of code-switching and language mixing for the development of the language, and the role of language contact in general in Central Europe. Contents: Dieter Kastovsky/Arthur Mettinger: Introduction - David Burnley: French and Frenches in fourteenth-century London - Andrei Danchev(+)/Merja Kyt¿: The Middle English "for to + infinitive" construction: A twofold contact phenomenon? - Hans-J¿rgen Diller: Verbs of verbal communication in the English Renaissance: A lexical field under language contact - Richard Dury: The history of the English language in the context of the history of the European languages - Andreas Fischer: Lexical borrowing and the history of English: A typology of typologies - Udo Fries: Foreign place names in the ZEN-Corpus - Raymond Hickey: Language contact and typological difference: Transfer between Irish and Irish English - Thomas Kohnen: The influence of "Latinate" constructions in Early Modern English: Orality and literacy as complementary forces - Lucia Kornexl: "Unnatural Words"? Loan formations in Old English glosses - Manfred Markus: Duplications of vowels in Middle English spelling - Gabriella Mazzon: Language contact in the history of Englishes, or the genesis of extraterritorial varieties - Ruta Nagucka: Latin prepositional phrases and their Old English equivalents - Gabriele Rinelli: Scandinavian and native social terms in Middle English: The case of cherl/carl - Nikolaus Ritt: The spread of Scandinavian third person plural pronouns in English: Optimisation, adaptation and evolutionary stability - Herbert Schendl: Code-switching in medieval English poetry - Robert P. Stockwell/Donka Minkova: The partial-contact origins of English parameter verse: The Anglicization of an Italian model