A General Research on Eurasian Linguistic Areas - Language contact in Eurasia -

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In this research project, the members studied the languages in Eurasia. Among the languages studied here are Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic, Tibet-Burman, Korean and Caucasian languages. The areas in which these languages are spoken cover almost the entire area of Eurasia. In the period of the project, the members collected and researched on language materials, taking the situations of language contact into account. The Eurasian region is characterized by its abundant cases of language contact. Among Eurasian languages, there are a group of languages which coexist for a long time in a rather limited multilingual region, some languages which are threatened by the more overwhelming languages, some "mixed" languages and also some "dead" languages, whose written texts are preserved only in some fragments. Eurasia has been the stage of language history from ancient times until today.As the research results, we published a lot of articles or monographs respectively. At the end of the term of the project, the members published a volume of the collected papers under the title of Approaches Eurasian Linguistic Areas (the 7^<th> volume of the Contribution to the Studies of Eurasian Language series). The articles are outputs of research which focus on the perspective of linguistic areas in Eurasia, where multilingual situations are found on various levels diachronically and synchronically.The participants of the project conducted their research with the aim of making clear the mechanism of language evolution from the ecological aspect of languages : language birth - language growth - language contact - language decline - language loss - language birth. We expect our research to become an invaluable resource in the further studies of languages in Eurasia. We have already started the new project under the title of "Language contact and Language Formation in Eurasia - Mechanism for formation of a new language -"