Metatypy: Two Southeast Asian Examples

In recent years, Malcolm Ross (2003, and elsewhere) has been writing about the social contexts of contact-induced change, in particular about what he terms ‘metatypy’, the structural effects and social correlates of intense bilingual contact on what he terms the primary lect, with his emphasis on extending our understanding of the social contexts involved. Ross’s work on metatypy is an extension of Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988:50) ‘borrowing ’ and Weinreich’s (1963 [1953]) ‘grammatical interference’. Like Thomson and Kaufman (1988:35), he would argue that social context plays a greater role in determining the outcome of contact-induced change than does linguistic structure. Although Ross (2003:188) lists some 16 languages that have undergone metatypy along with their metatypic model and provides a characterization of the process, he makes it clear that gaps exist in our understanding both of the structural changes and of the social contexts, particularly the latter. Thus, to Ross’s list can be adde