On the sociolinguistic typology of linguistic complexity loss

The nature of the human language faculty is the same the world over, and has been so ever since humans became human. This paper, however, considers the possibility that, because of the influence which social structure can have on language structure, this common faculty may produce structurally different types of language under different sociolinguistic conditions. Changing sociolinguistic conditions in the modern world are likely to have the consequence that, in time, the only languages remaining in the world will be severely atypical of how languages have been throughout most of human history. 1. SOCIOLINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY. Workers involved with language documentation are only too well aware that a very large proportion of the world’s languages are likely to be lost to us before very long. There is one aspect of this language loss, however, which is not often mentioned and which makes the task of documentation and description even more urgent. In this paper I discuss this particular aspect of language loss from the perspective of sociolinguistic typology. By sociolinguistic typology, I mean a form of linguistic typology which is sociolinguistically informed, asks sociolinguistic questions, and tries to suppl