Part III concerns approaches from language contact and typology. Since contact is a driving force for typological change, there is a strong link between them (highlighted by the presence of chapters on creolization in both sections of this part (47, 53)). Both contact and typology have been studied for half a century, but largely as fields of research separate from each other and from the history of English. The chapters in Part III seek to integrate the two fields directly into the history of English.
The first group of chapters, coordinated by Raymond Hickey (37), focuses on three phases of contact: (1) contact in the early periods (chapters 38–41 by Hickey, Lutz, Machan, Pahta); (2) more recent contact in urban North America, Africa, and South-East Asia (42–44 by Boberg, Deumert and Mesthrie, Lim and Ansaldo); and (3) varieties of English worldwide (45–47 by E. Schneider, Sharma, Winford). A link to Chinese sound features in Chinese and East Asian Englishes is associated with chapter 45.
The second group of chapters, coordinated by Bernd Kortmann (48), concerns a wide spectrum of typological shifts from word order (Hawkins, 49) to use of pronouns (Laitinen, 50), and changes in syntheticity and analyticity in the lexicon (Haselow, 51) and in morphology (Szmrecsanyi, 52). A. Schneider (53) presents characteristics of the noun phrase in English-based pidgins and creoles, and Wichmann and Urban (54) introduce a new computational methodology for determining relationships among varieties of English. A step-by-step account of the process of the methodology used is linked with chapter 54.
Closely related chapters in other parts of the volume include Mukherjee and Schilk (14) on variation in New Englishes as evidenced by the International Corpus of English (ICE), Cameron (27) on English as a global commodity, and Sharma and Wiltshire (61) on continua and clines in the development of New Englishes.
Related resources on the website for both sections include a link to a recently established open access website of the electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English (eWAVE), which maps morphosyntactic variation among 74 varieties of English, including 26 English-based pidgins and creoles. There are also maps showing the colonial spread of Irish English (a), Englishes in the Northern and Southern hemispheres in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries (b), Anglophone pidgins and creoles (c), and Englishes in South-East Asia (d) and Africa (e).