Converging patterns of clause linkage in Nagaland A.R. Coupe 1. Introduction Past studies of language contact in South Asia have been largely confined to investigations of structural similarities shared by Indo-Aryan, Munda or Dravidian languages, e.g. Emeneau (1956), Gumpertz and Wilson (1971) and Nadkarni (1975). This paper shifts the focus of attention to the north- eastern corner of India, the most linguistically-diverse region of the subcontinent, and yet still the most scantily documented. The following discussion presents evidence of linguistic convergence in Nagaland, a state of north-eastern India where at least two dozen distinct languages are spoken in a mountainous area of 16,500 km, approximately one fifth the size of Austria. My personal interest in this topic has grown out of a grammatical description of the Mongsen dialect of Ao that was originally submitted as a doctoral dissertation at La Trobe University (Coupe 2003, forthcoming), and through subsequent research on the typology of clause linkage in Tibeto-Burman languages (henceforth TB languages). 1 Recurrent syntactic patterns and other commonalities in Tibeto-Burman languages and unrelated languages in contact suggest that these phenomena might be attributed to linguistic convergence facilitated by bilingualism. This chapter investigates those recurrent syntactic patterns and discusses the nature of linguistic convergence in Nagaland using data from the Tibeto-Burman languages Mongsen Ao, Chang and Khiamniungan, an eastern variety of the Indo-Aryan language Nepali, and a lingua franca with an Indo-Aryan base known locally as Nagamese (also known infelicitously as Naga Pidgin). Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 37–41) make reference to two basic types of contact-induced language change: borrowing and substratum inter- ference, although they find that the term “substratum” proves to be overly restrictive. The term is also somewhat inappropriate for describing the characteristics of interference in Nagaland, since no single language of those demonstrating evidence of convergence may claim to have greater prestige than any other. Thomason and Kaufman note that the greatest