Studying Contact without Detailed Studies of the Languages Involved: A Non-Philological Approach to Language Contact

Studies of contact have revealed that all kinds of language material can, in the right circumstances, be borrowed from one language to another. Detecting, describing, and analyzing such situations typically involve the detailed study of at least two languages. An alternative involves detecting contact situations through database analysis. This cannot supplant the detailed work that requires detailed descriptive work in particular fields, but can allow us to examine large enough samples of languages that we can start to better understand, through calibration against known histories and other non-linguistic data types, likelihoods of different ‘social contact’ scenarios resulting in different kinds of linguistic traces, and also allow for the more targeted investigation of specific areas and language-to-language interactions. I shall describe the method, and illustrate its application in a number of case studies in regions for which we have good samples of language data.