Word.ws English Dictionary

metatypy

metatypy noun: the morphosyntactic change that a language undergoes due to its speakers being bilingual.

Noun

metatypy (uncountable)

  1. The morphosyntactic change that a language undergoes due to its speakers being bilingual.
    • The Trans New Guinea language area is probably the result of repeated metatypy rather than of common genetic origin.1996, Malcolm Ross, “Contact-induced change and the comparative method”, in The comparative method reviewed: regularity and irregularity in language change, page 209

Origin of metatypy

Coined by Australian and British linguist Malcolm Ross in 1996.

Questions about metatypy

What does metatypy mean?
Metatypy means the morphosyntactic change that a language undergoes due to its speakers being bilingual.
What part of speech is metatypy?
Metatypy is a noun.

Words near metatypy in the dictionary

  1. metatungstates
  2. metatungstic acid
  3. metatype
  4. metatypes
  5. metatypical
  6. metatypy
  7. metatyuyamunite
  8. metaunderstanding
  9. metaunderstandings
  10. metauniverse
  11. metauniverses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: metatypy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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