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Towards an Integrated Model of Change: Language Contact, Dialect Contact, Internal Variation

Christopher Lucas

Published 2025 in Transactions of the Philological Society

ABSTRACT

This article outlines an integrated model of language change, where change is viewed as the acquisition of innovative grammars by individual native speakers. It is integrated in that it shows how change that is induced by contact between languages, dialects and sociolects can be understood, alongside purely internal change, as part of a single process of acquisition on the basis of innovative linguistic production. Unlike much previous work in this tradition, the focus is not on purely internal change, with contact‐induced change viewed as secondary. Instead, it is shown how existing models of how language contact leads to change can be extended to conditions of dialect contact and sociolinguistic variation, and it is argued that it is contact, not purely internal processes, that is the key driver of change (via innovative production). The arguments presented are grounded in findings from the literature on bilingual acquisition and second dialect acquisition and illustrated with examples of changes drawn chiefly from the literature on Arabic in contact.

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