Dialect Mixing as a Language Contact in the History of English

In recent years, language contacts have been considered one of the main causes for language change (Heine and Kuteva 2005, 2006), and this is also the case in English. However, English has gone through a range of contacts including a mutually intelligible language, e.g., Old Norse, and various dialects. In the context of English, French does not form a similar kind of contact, since it was spoken by a handful of people who had to learn it. Mutual intelligibility is one of the crucial factors that forced earlier English grammar into its current form. The grammar of Present-Day English is full of peculiarities typologically (Toyota, forthcoming), and its unique history of contacts may be responsible for this