Language Contact, Inherited Similarity and Social Difference

This book offers a study of long-term, intensive language contact between more than a dozen Mayan languages spoken in the lowlands of Guatemala, Southern Mexico and Belize. It details the massive restructuring of syntactic and semantic organization, the calquing of grammatical patterns, and the direct borrowing of inflectional morphology, including, in some of these languages, the direct borrowing of even entire morphological paradigms. The in-depth analysis of contact among the genetically related Lowland Mayan languages presented in this volume serves as a highly relevant case for theoretical, historical, contact, typological, socio- and anthropological linguistics. This linguistically complex situation involves serious engagement with issues of methods for distinguishing contact-induced similarity from inherited similarity, the role of social and ideological variables in conditioning the outcomes of language contact, cross-linguistic tendencies in language contact, as well as the effect that inherited similarity can have on the processes and outcomes of language contact.

Rusty Barret, University of Kentucky, in Journal of Language Contact Vol. 2016, pp. 1-3:
Law analyzes language contact between lowland Mayan languages, demonstrating that the study of contact between related languages is not only possible, but that such studies have important implications for understanding language contact more broadly. [...] Indeed, such research may reveal patterns that are quite different from those typically found in research on contact between unrelated languages. In addition to providing a unique and interesting case study, the book challenges a number of common assumptions within the field and makes a major theoretical contribution to the study of language contact.