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Structural compatibility
Language contact situations, in which speakers of different languages come into contact with one another, can have a variety of outcomes. These outcomes can include borrowing, in which words or phrases from one language are adopted into another language; code-switching, in which speakers alternate between languages or use elements from multiple languages in a single conversation; convergence, in which two languages become more similar to one another as a result of contact; language shift, in which speakers of one language adopt the language of another group; and ultimately, language death, in which a language is no longer spoken by any native speakers. The specific outcome of a language contact situation can be influenced by a variety of factors. Typological similarities between languages may play a significant role in determining the outcome of a contact situation. In a situation of contact between a prestige language and a less prestigious language, structural compatibility between the two languages increases the likelihood that a population will shift towards speaking the more dominant language. This process often results in the eventual death of the less prestiguous language. Structural incompatibility, on the other hand, may limit the effects of contact to lexical borrowing. This can be observed in the historical cases of Arabic language contact with Coptic and Persian. Coptic was the language spoken by the majority of Egyptians for most of the 1st millennium CE. After the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 646 CE, Arabic was instituted as the language of administration and commerce. After six centuries of contact between Arabic and Coptic, the majority of Egyptians had shifted to speaking Arabic as their first language, and by the 17th century Coptic was no longer spoken except as the liturgical language of the Coptic church. Similarly, Persia was conquered by Arabic speakers in 654 AD. Large amounts of Arabic vocabulary entered into the Persian language, with an estimated 50% to 90% of the modern Persian lexicon being of Arabic origin. Despite this, Persian speakers did not shift to speaking Arabic.

As seen in the table above, Coptic and Arabic share many structural similarities to the exclusion of Persian. Both Arabic and Coptic are Afroasiatic languages with nonconcatenative morphology typical of that language family, while Persian belongs to the unrelated Indo-European family of languages. Coptic and Arabic share similar word order, nominal constructions, and gender marking. They also both feature so-called “broken” plurals, where plurals are formed by changing the vowels of the singular form.

In further support of the idea that structural compatibility influences the outcome of language contact is the fact that prior to the Muslim conquest, Coptic/Egyptian speakers spent nearly a millennium in contact with Greek as a prestige language. Like Persian, Greek is an Indo-European language genetically unrelated and typologically dissimilar to Coptic. Mirroring the Persian-Arabic situation, a large portion of Coptic vocabulary is of Greek origin. However, Coptic speakers never shifted en masse to speaking Greek.