ABSTRACT
The influence that languages can exert on one another when they come into contact has long been a subject of linguistic debate: What can change, how far can the influence go, what factors inhibit contact-induced change? Language contact research is still far from able to clearly answer questions even so general in nature. Most investigations to date have been limited to cataloguing and describing contact-related change. Nevertheless, recent decades have witnessed some progress. In particular, a number of earlier, extremely generalizing theories have been disproved. Reductionist theses, which limit the influence to individual factors, have largely given way to the realization that the linguistic outcome of language encounters is determined by a rather complex interplay of causes. Nonetheless, diachronic linguistics still lacks theoretically sound and empirically proven hypotheses to accommodate the processes in question.
