Loss and Leveling

<jats:p>This chapter examines the formal and sociolinguistic factors that drive loss and leveling, with additional commentary on the relative stability of grammar. Through three case studies – on oblique case syncretism in German, register compression in German and Korean, and on grammatical gender in Scandinavian – the chapter shows that a reduction in social, paradigmatic, and grammatical variation is common in both contact and non‐contact varieties, but that loss and leveling – even as subtractive processes – do not often result in a loss of entire systems such as nominal morphology, register, or grammatical gender; nor do such processes lead to a reduction in native speakers' ability to communicate with their interlocutors.</jats:p>