Metatypy

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The morphosyntactic change that a language undergoes due to its speakers being bilingual. uncountable

    "The Trans New Guinea language area is probably the result of repeated metatypy rather than of common genetic origin."

Example

More examples

"The Trans New Guinea language area is probably the result of repeated metatypy rather than of common genetic origin."

Etymology

Coined by Australian and British linguist Malcolm Ross in 1996.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.