The extent to which language contact is a driving force for language variation and complexity is an ongoing, unresolved, and controversially debated issue in the theoretical linguistics community. In this context, speaker numbers are commonly used as a proxy for language contact and concomitant adult second language acquisition. In this talk, I provide a fresh, corpus-based and intra-linguistic perspective on this debate. Specifically, I assess how language contact impacts morphosyntactic variation in a typological corpus database of 25 English varieties.

Pooling results from multiple analyses of speaker numbers and different morphosyntactic complexity measures, the robustness of the hypothesis that language contact as adult second language acquisition shapes morphosyntactic variation in English is evaluated. In this spirit, I also discuss the appropriateness of present-day speaker numbers as a proxy for historical language contact and the possibility that different linguistic structures are more or less responsive to pressures of language contact and acquisition.