language shift

[Östen Dahl]

I think the claim that language shift always moves in the direction of a
morphologically simpler language can be safely refuted by pointing to
cases where language shifts have taken place in both directions within
the same language pair. For instance,  Finnish has gained speakers from
Swedish in Finland, and Swedish has gained speakers from Finnish in
Sweden. So irrespective of whether Finnish or Swedish is the
morphologically most complex language, it is safe to say that both these
developments cannot be compatible with the claim at the same time. There
should be plenty of similar cases.
 
- Östen Dahl
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