Language Change and Language Contact

Mainstream historical linguistics came rather late to the knowledge that language contact can, and often does, lead directly to structural linguistic changes. Leading figures expressed a firm belief in severe constraints on structural interference; Meillet, for instance, believed that grammatical loans can only occur when the source and receiving systems are very similar (Meillet, 1921: 87), and Jakobson argued that “a language accepts foreign structural elements only when they correspond to its own tendencies of development” (Jakobson, 1962 [1938]: 241). These beliefs probably arose ultimately from a conviction that the Comparative Method would be threatened by the existence of extensive structural diffusion. It is no accident that Hugo Schuchardt, a major critic of what he saw as the Neogrammarians' intellectual rigidity in ignoring foreign interference, was the founder of pidgin/creole studies, because mixed languages like pidgins and creoles challenge the universality of the tidy family tree (see Thomason and Kaufman, 1988). In general, however, historical linguists have long tended to argue that a contact explanation for a change should be proposed only when all attempts to find a language-internal explanation have failed. Research over the past half century, starting with Weinreich's classic 1953 book Languages in contact, has brought about a recognition of the importance of language contact for explanations of many linguistic changes. In recent years, the trickle of monographs and even textbooks on language contact has become a flood (two of the most recent important treatments are Winford, 2003 and Clyne, 2003).