important role in almost all his publications on Germanic, and it was the first aspect he dealt with in his studies about language contact. Also, problems about accent interested him, as can be witnessed by his Towards a Typology of Lexical Accent and the last publication that he himself saw through the press. In that 2001 article, he proposed the following explanation of the "violent contrast" between the British and the American lexical accent (compare the three-syllable British pronunciation of necessary with the four-syllable American one). In British English, stress is so strong that neighboring syllables are weakened or disappear altogether and has an extremely dominant accent, which is difficult for non-native speakers to imitate. America was populated by so many non-native speakers that the inadequately weakened syllables in their pronunciation ended up in the standard pronunciation of American English. Coetsem's interest in linguistic variation led him to an in-depth investigation of language contact. He clearly distinguished between borrowing, which happens, for example, when a Dutch-speaker borrows the of English goal and the word, with imposition, which happens, for example, when a Dutch speaker imposes his articulatory habit on English by pronouncing goal with his Dutch . That distinction seems evident, but no one before him had ever formulated it so clearly or suspected its implications. A second fundamental factor that must not be remembered when language contact is studied is the degree of stability of a language component. For example, the lexicon of a language very unstable, but its morphology and syntax are much more stable. A word like save can easily be borrowed into Dutch but hardly its morphology: the Dutch principal parts of that borrowing are . In a number of publications, Coetsem elaborated those ideas and used them to explain all kinds of contact phenomena. Bibliography This chronologically ordered selection, lists, besides his books, only the publications mentioned in this Wikipedia article. Het dialect van Geraardsbergen: Klank- en vormleer (K.U.Leuven, 1952) (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis — see § 2.2; in the library of the Catholic University of Leuven.) F. Van Coetsem, G. Forrez, G. Geerts, J. Tyberghein Fonetische Platenatlas (Leuven: Acco, s.d.) Das System der starken Verba und die Periodisierung im älteren Germanischen (Mededelingen der KNAW, afd. Letterkunde, N.R. 19.1) (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1956) (Reprint 1964; see § 2.2.) "De rijksgrens tussen Nederland en België als taalgrens in de algemene taal" in: A. Weijnen & F.