[Lingtyp] Differential Object Marking and Language Contact

[Inbal Mayo]

Dear colleagues,

I hope this message finds you well. I am reaching out to request your
assistance with a survey I am conducting as part of my MA thesis on
languages that have acquired Differential Object Marking (DOM) due to
language contact.
So far, I have identified a few well-attested cases, for example in the
Tibeto-Burman language family, particularly the Kiranti languages (Ebert
2003; Bickel 2003, etc.), as well as a few other cases such as Afrikaans
(den Besten 2000), Basque (Rodríguez-Ordóñez 2020), and Paraguayan Guaraní
(Bittar 2023). However, I have also encountered some cases that are less
clear. For instance, in the Semitic language family (specifically Maltese
(Döhla 2016)) DOM has been proposed as a contact-induced feature, though
this relies on the  assumption that the language’s ancestors did not
originally have DOM. From what I understand, this assumption is under some
contention.
Additional problematic cases are found in the Indo-Iranian languages. For
example, DOM systems in Hindi and Persian are hypothesized to be due to
language contact (Montaut 2018 and Paul 2018 respectively), but according
to other sources DOM is extremely widespread in Indo-Aryan languages
(Schikowski 2013, which focuses on Nepali and relies on additional
descriptions of Indo-Aryan languages), which would make it is less likely
that this feature is contact-induced.

I would greatly appreciate any additional references or insights that could
shed light on these case studies, as well as information on other languages
where DOM is theorized to have developed due to language contact.

Thank you very much for your time!
Best regards,
Inbal Mayo
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