'Reversed change' dialect borrowing

[Sally Thomason]

I got a very nice Tibeto-Burman example of "reversed change"
from F.K. Lehman back in 1999: it's described in my paper
"Language contact and deliberate change", published in
the on-line journal Journal of Language Contact 1/1:41-62
(2007).  Here's the url to the journal article:
http://cgi.server.uni-frankfurt.de/fb09/ifas/JLCCMS/issues/THEMA_1/JLC_THEMA_1_2007_02Thomason.pdf

Below is the passage about the change (from a pre-publication
version of the paper, but I don't think this bit changed at all)
-- and I include the preceding paragraph too, because I see that
it is also about "reversed change".

  -- Sally
         **************************************************

   But there is direct evidence that speakers often---maybe
typically---know exactly what they are doing, at least
retrospectively but also beforehand, when they apply correspondence
rules.  Martha Ratliff has observed that `speakers of languages like
Arabic and Tamil, who have knowledge of a literary standard that is
quite different from the colloquial language..., can retard the
process of natural language change in the colloquial quite
consciously so that the two do not drift apart past a tolerable
limit' (p.c. 2000).  An example is a change introduced by Tamil
speakers into their colloquial speech: they deliberately reversed an
umlaut rule, modeling the change on literary Tamil, when the umlauted
vowels became socially stigmatized (Pargman 1998). 

   A somewhat similar reversal, but with a quite different
motivation, is found in an example from the Hakha dialect of Lai
Chin, a Tibeto-Burman language of the Kuki-Chin-Naga branch (this
example comes from F. K. Lehman, p.c. 1999).  Lai is very closely
related to Laizo (of Falam); both are spoken in the Chin State of
Burma (Myanmar).  Lai, but not Laizo, had undergone a sound change
that turned vowel + liquid sequences in syllable codas into
diphthongs---that is, deleting the liquid consonant and
diphthongizing the preceding vowel.  But by 1957, when Lehman began
his fieldwork in Hakha Lai territory, Standard Lai had apparently
reversed that sound change: it regularly had simple vowels followed
by coda liquids.  He later learned why and how this reversal had
happened.  In the last decade of the 19th century, the Hakha chiefs
became indignant because the British authorities had made Falam their
headquarters in the region and had adopted Laizo as their official
administrative language there.  The British action conferred prestige
on Laizo.  In an effort to regain what they viewed as their proper
regional status, the Hakha chiefs decreed that Hakha be pronounced
just like Laizo---including the coda monophthongal vowel + liquid
sequences, which Laizo retained.  (In 1962 Lehman was introduced to
some very elderly Lai speakers who still had the coda diphthongs
without coda liquids; these were people who had not followed the
chiefs' decree.  But everyone else had the coda monophthongs and
liquids.)  Lehman explains that the Lai change was possible because
the correspondences were `acutely transparent', and moreover
multilingualism was pervasive in the region, so that Lai speakers
could easily apply what amounts to a correspondence rule in reverse
and replace their native codas with the Laizo phonotactic
pattern.\footnotemark{}.  This example is one of the clearest I've
found that shows (pace Andersen 2005) that groups of speakers can
indeed introduce new linguistic structure by deliberate decision.
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