The syntax of the relative clause in the Saraswat Brahmin dialect of Konkani, an Indo-Aryan language, has been virtually Dravidianized because of the impact of the Dravidian Kannada language, operating through bilingual speakers. Konkani has two versions of the relative clause-a native Indo-Aryan type, and a borrowed Kannada type; the latter is gaining predominance at the cost of the former, which has come under various kinds of constraints. The mechanism of this syntactic change is examined here. The peculiar features of the Konkani-Kannada bilingual situation are described, and an attempt is made to provide an explanatory account of the syntactic change in Konkani. This paper examines the effects of bilingualism on the syntax of the relative clause in a certain dialect of Konkani, an Indo-Aryan (IA) language, whose speakers have also been fluent speakers of the Dravidian language Kannada for the last 400 years or more. The syntax of the relative clause in this particular dialect of Konkani is interesting in many respects: it provides a very clear instance of structural borrowing at the level of syntax under the impact of bilingualism; the borrowing itself, while it affects the relative clause in the language so profoundly as to virtually 'Dravidianize' it, is yet in some sense 'motiveless'; finally, an uncommonly clear view is provided on certain aspects of the change mechanism itself. 1. Like all languages of the Indian subcontinent, Konkani has many dialects distinguishable along geographical, social, and communal axes.1 But some of these dialects have not come under the impact of Kannada, e.g. those spoken in the erstwhile Portuguese colony Goa, as well as those spoken in the Konkan districts of the present State of Maharashtra. In this paper, however, I am concerned with a dialect which has come under Kannada influence, viz. the Konkani of Saraswat