Resumen de Introduction

Anna Verschik

• This special issue is partly based on the papers presented in the colloquium Language contacts in the post-Soviet space, organized by the guest-editor at the 6th International Symposium on Bilingualism in Hamburg in 2007. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first collection of articles dedicated to post-Soviet language contacts. In what follows I will try to situate the topic within the context of research in such established fields as contact linguistics, post-Soviet studies, and research on Russian in diaspora. These fields do have many aspects and viewpoints in common with the proposed topic of post-Soviet language contacts but, nonetheless, there are important theoretical and methodological differences as well.