Language Contact and Deliberate Change

Historical linguists have always known that some linguistic changes result from deliberate, conscious actions by speakers. But the general assumption has been that such changes are relatively trivial, confined mainly to the invention or borrowing of new words, changes in lexical semantics, and the adoption of a few structural features from a prestige dialect. The goal of this paper is to show that adult speakers can and do make deliberate choices that bring about nontrivial lexical and structural linguistic change; I also discuss some of the implications of the most extreme examples for historical linguistic methodology. Although such processes are not confined to contact-induced change, the focus here is on processes motivated at least in part by language contact. The particular categories that I’ll focus on are correspondence rules applied in lexical borrowing, deliberate non-change, and deliberate structural change. Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from examples of deliberate change and deliberate non-change is that efforts to develop deterministic predictive theories of contact-induced change – either by setting theoretical limits on its extent or by predicting specific outcomes under specific linguistic and/or social conditions – are doomed; but I won’t explore this point in detail in the present paper (see Thomason 2000 for discussion of the general issue).