Language Log: Where have all the inflections gone?

[Anthea Fraser Gupta]

Peter Trudgill discusses this in his 1986 book 'Dialects in Contact', and as far as I know this (though a bit confusing) is the most up-front discussion of the concept of 'naturalness' in language -- that lots of inflectional morphology reflects absence of contact. Little inflectional morpholology does not necessarily mean that there has been significant contact, but all contact varieties have little inflectional morphology.
 
There is also evidence of contact varieties (such as Tok Pisin) acquiring inflectional morphology. It's absolutely right that (and not only in linguistics) we need to break away from the mind set that Western European languages and the societies Western Europeans have created are the most evolved and most inevitable.
 
Anthea