This book raises some important questions about formal linguistics and functionalist sociolinguistics when they encompass the same subject matter, linguistic borrowing and code-switching/mixing. These questions arise in the context of formalist and functionalist accounts of language contact and are tested here against some interesting Hindustani-English contact facts from India.

The test reveals what these paradigms contribute to our understanding of language contact (and language in general) and precisely where they seem to go wrong.