Language contact and typological change: The case of Estonian revisited

Abstract

The traditional hypothesis of a typological cycle from agglutination via fusion to isolation and back to agglutination, still invoked by many linguists (albeit with caveats and limitations), would imply a natural drift behind typological changes. Accordingly, such typological changes would typically result from internal developments (such as reductive sound changes), while etymological counter-currents (such as segmentable suffixes replacing earlier stem alternations) could rather be due to language contact. On the other hand, the agglutinative type seems to be stable and resistant to typological change especially in Northern Eurasia, and for the change towards a more fusional type, characteristic of some Finnic and Saami languages in the northwestern periphery of Uralic, a contact explanation might seem plausible. However, a closer scrutiny of Estonian, often mentioned as an example of typological change and characteristically impacted by Germanic, shows that in typological change, internal and external motivations intertwine and interact.