This book is an innovative contribution to contact linguistics as it presents a rarely studied but sizeable diaspora language community in contact with five languages ¿ English, German, Italian, Norwegian and Spanish ¿ across four continents. Foregrounded by diachronic descriptions of heritage Croatian in long-standing minority communities the book presents synchronically based studies of the speech of different generations of diaspora speakers. Croatian offers excellent scope as a base language to examine how lexical and morpho- structural innovations occur in a highly inflective Slavic language where external influence from Germanic and Romance languages appears evident. The possibility of internal factors is also addressed and interpretive models