Contact-induced typological change

1. Introduction. It is easy to show that contact-induced change can have a profound effect on the typological profile of the receiving language. Probably the most obvious examples , and also the ones that are easiest to find, are changes in basic sentential word order. These are especially striking because it is word order features that have attracted the most attention in the typological literature, starting with the famous 1963 article by Greenberg that moved typology into the mainstream of linguistic research. But word order features—or, more generally, morpheme order features—are by no means the only parts of language structure that have been transformed under the influence of other languages. Contact-induced changes have also affected the typological character of morphological, phonological, lexical semantic, and discourse systems in a wide variety of languages. This article surveys contact-induced typological changes and shows where and how different degrees of change correlate with different social conditions. After some introductory comments on the contact conditions in which typological change is likely to happen (§2) and on the problem of determining whether a given change is typologically significant or not (§3), I will discuss and exemplify immediate typological effects (§4) and delayed typological effects (§5). Finally, I will consider the question of whether or not language mixing constitutes contact-induced typological change (§6). The article ends with a brief conclusion (§7).