Editing Language convergence (section)

== Difficulties ==

When studying convergence, linguists take care to distinguish between features inherited from a language's proto-language, internally motivated changes, and diffusion from an outside source; in order to argue for language convergence, linguists try to argue for both an outside source and the mechanism that precipitated the change.<ref name=":3" /> The more drastic effects of language convergence, such as significant syntactic convergence and mixed languages, lead some linguists to question the validity of traditional historical linguistic methods.<ref name=":0" /> Because of these far-reaching effects, other linguists are hesitant to accept convergence explanations for similar features and argue that often another explanation better represents changes that might otherwise attributed to language convergence.<ref name=":0" />