Bilingual contact, whereby speakers use two languages in their daily lives, is a very common phenomenon. Among such contacts, Romance-Germanic bilingualism is one of the most widespread. This book investigates several phonetic and phonological issues that are in contrast between four Germanic languages (English, German, Danish and Swedish ? more than 500 million speakers) and four Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian ? more than 700 million speakers). The chapters cover several well-established phonotactic, segmental and suprasegmental conflicting situations between Germanic and Romance languages: cross-language interaction among young bilinguals as well as adults; the representation and/or instantiation of phonological knowledge in the speech of L2 users; and the sociophonetics of certain segmental and suprasegmental issues in bilinguals.

Based on substantial original empirical research, published here for the first time, this volume represents the most current thinking on the topics covered, and provides essential reading for students, professionals and researchers in the fields of Bilingualism, Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy, Psycholinguistics, Applied Phonetics and Phonology, Romance Linguistics and Germanic Linguistics.