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Diachronica: Online-First Articles

A typological approach to language change in contact situations

ORCID logo | University of Helsinki
ORCID logo | Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, LPL | University of Helsinki
| University of Edinburgh | University of Helsinki
| University of Cologne

Language contact phenomena have increasingly been researched from different historical linguistic, sociolinguistic and areal-typological perspectives. However, since most of this research is based on case studies, an assessment of contact phenomena from a worldwide comparative perspective has been missing in the literature. In this article, we draw inspiration from historical linguistics and language typology to present a new typological approach for evaluating evidence that given linguistic domains have been affected by language contact. This method has three parts: (1) a new approach to sampling, (2) the analysis of typological data, and (3) making probabilistic inferences about language contact. We argue that this is a parsimonious method for evaluating contact effects that can serve as a starting point for the further development of typological approaches to language contact.

Keywords: language contact, language typology, language variation, sampling, convergence, stability, Bayesian approach
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Sampling for contact
  • 3.Coding design for typological variables
    • 3.1Principles of coding design
    • 3.2Example: Syllable structure
  • 4.Evaluating evidence for contact
    • 4.1Analytical grid for evaluating evidence for contact
      • 4.1.1Example: Syllable structure
    • 4.2Bayesian assessment of evidence for contact
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Statement of author contributions
  • Notes
  • Supplements
    • Supplement S1.Descriptions of the broad typological categories
      • Summary of the definition files
        • Nominal number
        • Adnominal possession
        • Lexical prosody systems
        • Adnominal demonstratives
    • Supplement S2.Example data from 2 sample sets for syllable structure
    • Supplement S3.R function for beta distribution
    • Supplement S4.Potential improvements to the inference model
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 25 June 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.23029.sin
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