One proposed mechanism of language change concerns the role played by second-language (L2) learners in situations contact. If sufficiently many L2 speakers are present a speech community relation to number first-language (L1) speakers, then those features which difficulty acquisition may be prone disappearing from language. This paper presents mathematical account such contact based on stochast...

This analysis includes a description of language contact phenomena such as stratification, hybridization and convergence for Sinitic languages. It also presents typologically unusual grammatical features for Sinitic such as double patient constructions, negative existential constructions and agentive adversative passives, while tracing the development of complementizers and diminutives and dema...

Under conditions of language contact, a language may gain features from its neighbors that it is unlikely to have gotten endogenously. We describe a method for evaluating pairs of languages for potential contact by comparing a null hypothesis in which a target language obtained all its features by inheritance, with an alternative hypothesis in which the target language obtained its features via...

Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) gives a measure of the amount of variation between adjacent speech units, making it possible to arrange languages in a continuum of relative variability. In the present study, the PVI of Estonian speakers living in Sweden for over 60 years was compared to the PVI of Swedish and of Estonian spoken in Estonia. The results show that (1) PVI is significantly higher ...