ABSTRACT
During the last half century a formidable amount of scholarly research into language contact has been accumulated and we now know a great deal more about the social and linguistic aspects of bilingualism and bilingual speakers than our predecessors. Yet several puzzles remain. For instance, although one of the best studied areas is lexical borrowing, we do not yet know why it occurs in one community and not in a totally similar other community. As Sarah G. Thomason pointed out in a lecture,1 the speakers of the Native American Salish language which she studies do not seem to have borrowed a single English loanword-they have coined their own word even for automobile. Most nonEnglish-speaking peoples in the USA have borrowed automobile, but the Salish have not. In what follows I will attempt to tease out another mystery: why some language contacts breed social conflicts but others do not.
