Abstract
As an enterprise, linguistic typology is perhaps best understood in terms of the shared ideology of its practitioners. In studying contact‐induced change typologists can begin to understand which features of language are readily acquired or arise through contact. This chapter focuses on recent developments in research on language contact in relation to contemporary thought in linguistic typology. While typology in general is concerned with identifying sets of variables and developing probabilistic theories explaining their distribution, morphological typology relates these goals to the shape, properties, and distribution of morphological systems. The chapter examines some of the ways in an understanding of the diversity of morphological systems can help provide support for contact‐based explanations of linguistic variables. It presents a case study to show that the typological properties of a language may also be changed through contact that leads to loss, rather than augmentation or reorganization.