Since the colonial expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, many typologically different languages have come into contact with Spanish and Portuguese in a wide range of geographical, historical and sociocultural settings. This special issue brings together various contributions that focus on such postcolonial contact situations and their linguistic outcomes outside of Europe.1 A variety of different linguistic aspects of these language contact situations are studied empirically in this volume. These include particular case studies of contact-induced change at different language levels, including the syntax and intonation system, (i) in Spanish and Portuguese varieties spoken outside Europe (e.g. in the Americas, Africa, Asia), (ii) in indigenous languages with which these Ibero-Romance languages have come into contact, and (iii) in Spanish- and Portuguese-lexified Creoles. Apart from providing novel empirical data, this thematic volume also offers theoretical insights as several issues surrounding language contact are addressed, such as the formal constraints on borrowability and grammaticalization. The volume comprises, apart from this introduction, which offers a preliminary overview, five articles that reflect contact situations with Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas (Anthony Grant; Melanie Uth; Rodrigo Gutiérrez-Bravo), on Africa (Rita Gonçalves, Anna Jon-And, Juanito Ornelas de Avelar and Laura Álvarez López), and on Asia (Eeva Sippola and Marivic Lesho).