Carmel O’Shannessy and Felicity Meakins Australian language contact in historical and synchronic perspective 1 Introduction This volume is the first collection of research dedicated to the effects of recent language contact processes on Australian languages. Multilingualism and lan- guage contact have always been pervasive in Australia (Bowern & Koch 2004; Koch 1997; McConvell & Bowern 2011), but have often been discussed in the context of identifying genetic relationships between languages. At the time of British colonisation, there were approximately 250 languages spoken in Australia, many with several dialects. Colonisation brought the extensive diffusion of English and with it a dramatically different configuration of languages in contact, including the emergence of pidgins, creoles and mixed languages and a range of English-lexified varieties and dialects, such as Aboriginal English. Now rela- tively few traditional languages are spoken day-to-day or are being transmitted to children. Yet notions of simplification and loss do not adequately capture the complexity and dynamics of the contemporary contexts. Indigenous people have developed complex linguistic repertoires, often including other traditional lan- guages and varieties of English and/or Kriol (an English-lexified creole), or a mixed language. Many of the contact languages co-existed for periods of time with traditional languages, and in some cases, still do, raising questions of con- tinuing and bidirectional contact influences. Indigenous speakers have shifted, or are shifting away from traditional languages in many locations, but in some places traditional languages remain the primary languages spoken, with English or Kriol included in speakers’ repertoires. These constantly evolving scenarios raise questions of what kinds of language contact mechanisms and outcomes are at play in contemporary language-in-use, and this volume collates research at the vanguard of that exploration. The research presented in this volume marks a new era of linguistic work on Australian languages. The last 40 years have seen a concerted effort to describe traditional Australian languages rather than contact varieties. The focus is largely the result of the urgency of documenting these endangered languages. However, in the 1970s through to the mid-1980s, attention was given to the English-based pidgin and Kriol. The pidgin developed in the Sydney colony and diffused into the Pacific and northern Australia, and transformed into north Australian Kriol, that developed as a result of interactions between speakers of the pidgin, traditional languages and English. The interest in Australian pidgin