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Language contact
Languages meet through speakers, scribes, institutions and texts. Contact may leave loans, translations, shared conventions or code choice. Similarity alone is not proof of borrowing; chronology and plausible routes matter.
Language contact
Contact settings
People and institutions bring languages together in trade, migration, schooling, administration and ritual. A bilingual text shows a written practice in one setting; it cannot by itself tell us how every inhabitant spoke. The Sumerian–Akkadian lexical lists documented by DCCLT belong to a scribal learning tradition, where a learned language was preserved beside another language.
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A reading check
Worked question
A text uses a borrowed alphabet. Does that prove its language is a daughter of the alphabet’s earlier language?
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No. Script history and language family history must be demonstrated independently. Coptic is Egyptian in a Greek-derived script.