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   » Wiki: Sprachbund
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A sprachbund (, from , 'language federation'), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of that share resulting from geographical proximity and . The languages may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related, but the sprachbund characteristics might give a false appearance of relatedness.

A grouping of languages that share features can only be defined as a sprachbund if the features are shared for some reason other than the genetic history of the languages. Without knowledge of the history of a regional group of similar languages, it may be difficult to determine whether sharing indicates a language family or a sprachbund.

(1981). 9780444863119, North-Holland.


History
In a 1904 paper, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay emphasised the need to distinguish between language similarities arising from a genetic relationship ( rodstvo) and those arising from convergence due to language contact ( srodstvo).

Nikolai Trubetzkoy introduced the Russian term языковой союз ( 'language union') in a 1923 article. In a paper presented to the first International Congress of Linguists in 1928, he used a German of this term, Sprachbund, defining it as a group of languages with similarities in , morphological structure, cultural vocabulary and sound systems, but without systematic sound correspondences, shared basic morphology or shared basic vocabulary.

Later workers, starting with Trubetzkoy's colleague , reprinted in R. Jakobson: Selected writings, vol. 1: Phonological Studies. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 1971, pp. 137–148. have relaxed the requirement of similarities in all four of the areas stipulated by Trubetzkoy.

A rigorous set of principles for what evidence is valid for establishing a linguistic area has been presented by Campbell, Kaufman, and Smith-Stark.Campbell, Lyle, Terrence Kaufman, and Thomas C. Smith-Stark. "Meso-America as a linguistic area." Language (1986): 530-570.


Examples

The Balkans
The idea of areal convergence is commonly attributed to 's description in 1830 of Albanian, Bulgarian and Romanian as giving the impression of "nur eine Sprachform ... mit dreierlei Sprachmaterie" (),Jernej K. Kopitar, "Albanische, walachische und bulgarische Sprache", Wiener Jahrbücher der Literatur 46 (1830): 59–106. which has been rendered by as "one grammar with three lexicons".

The Balkan Sprachbund comprises Albanian, Romanian, the South Slavic languages of the southern Balkans (Bulgarian, Macedonian and to a lesser degree Serbo-Croatian), , Balkan , and .

All but one of these are Indo-European languages but from very divergent branches, and Turkish is a . Yet they have exhibited several signs of grammatical convergence, such as avoidance of the , formation, and others.

The same features are not found in other languages that are otherwise closely related, such as the other Romance languages in relation to Romanian, and the other Slavic languages such as Polish in relation to Bulgaro-Macedonian.


Mainland Southeast Asia
Languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area have such great surface similarity that early linguists tended to group them all into a single family, although the modern consensus places them into numerous unrelated families. The area stretches from Thailand to China and is home to speakers of languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Tai–Kadai, Austronesian (represented by ) and Mon–Khmer families.

Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion. A well-known example is the similar tone systems in Sinitic languages (Sino-Tibetan), Hmong–Mien, (Kadai) and Vietnamese (Austroasiatic). Most of these languages passed through an earlier stage with three tones on most syllables (but no tonal distinctions on ending in a ), which was followed by a where the distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants disappeared but in compensation the number of tones doubled. These parallels led to confusion over the classification of these languages, until André-Georges Haudricourt showed in 1954 that tone was not an invariant feature, by demonstrating that Vietnamese tones corresponded to certain final consonants in other languages of the Mon–Khmer family, and proposed that tone in the other languages had a similar origin.

Similarly, the unrelated (Mon–Khmer), (Austronesian) and (Kadai) languages have almost identical vowel systems. Many languages in the region are of the isolating (or analytic) type, with mostly monosyllabic morphemes and little use of or , though a number of Mon–Khmer languages have derivational morphology. Shared syntactic features include classifiers, and topic–comment structure, though in each case there are exceptions in branches of one or more families.


Indian subcontinent
In a classic 1956 paper titled "India as a Linguistic Area", laid the groundwork for the general acceptance of the concept of a sprachbund. In the paper, Emeneau observed that the subcontinent's Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages shared a number of features that were not inherited from a common source, but were , the result of diffusion during sustained contact. These include retroflex consonants, , subject–object–verb word order, , and the .

Emeneau specified the tools to establish that language and culture had fused for centuries on the Indian soil to produce an integrated mosaic of structural convergence of four distinct language families: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, and . This concept provided scholarly substance for explaining the underlying Indian-ness of apparently divergent cultural and linguistic patterns. With his further contributions, this area has now become a major field of research in language contact and convergence.

(1980). 9780804710473, Stanford University Press.
(2025). 9780748607198, Edinburgh University Press.


Northeast Asia
Some linguists, such as Matthias Castrén, G. J. Ramstedt, and , supported the idea that the Mongolic, , and Tungusic families of Asia (and some small parts of Europe) have a common ancestry, in a controversial group they call . Koreanic and Japonic languages, which are also hypothetically related according to some scholars like William George Aston, Shōsaburō Kanazawa, Samuel Martin and , are sometimes included as part of the purported Altaic family. This latter hypothesis was supported by people including Roy Andrew Miller, John C. Street and Karl Heinrich Menges. , , , and others dispute or reject this. A common alternative explanation for similarities among the "Altaic" languages, such as and agglutination, is that they are due to areal diffusion.
(2025). 9780700711338, Routledge.

The Qinghai–Gansu sprachbund, in the northeastern part of the spanning the Chinese provinces of and , is an area of interaction between varieties of northwest , and Mongolic and .


Europe
Standard Average European ( SAE) is a concept introduced in 1939 by to group the modern Indo-European languages of Europe which shared common features."The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language", in , A. Irving Hallowell, Stanley S. Newman, eds. (1941), Language, Culture, and Personality: Essays in Memory of , Menasha, : Sapir Memorial Publication Fund. pp. 75–93.
Reprinted in John B. Carroll, eds. (1956), Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamins Lee Whorf. Cambridge, : . pp. 134–159.
Whorf argued that these were characterized by a number of similarities including and , and its use as well as the relationship between contrasting words and their origins, idioms and word order which all made them stand out from many other language groups around the world which do not share these similarities; in essence creating a continental sprachbund. His point was to argue that the disproportionate degree of knowledge of SAE languages biased towards considering grammatical forms to be highly natural or even universal, when in fact they were only peculiar to the SAE .

Whorf likely considered Romance and West Germanic to form the core of the SAE, i.e. the literary languages of which have seen substantial cultural influence from during the . The North Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages tend to be more peripheral members.

, who was instrumental in the development of , characterized it as "Standard Average European". The Romance, Germanic, and control languages of Interlingua are reflective of the language groups most often included in the SAE Sprachbund.

The Standard Average European Sprachbund is most likely the result of ongoing in the time of the "Language Typology and Language Universals" accessed 2015-10-13 and later, continuing during the and the . Inheritance of the SAE features from Proto-Indo-European can be ruled out because Proto-Indo-European, as currently reconstructed, lacked most of the SAE features.Haspelmath, Martin, 1998. "How young is Standard Average European?" Language Sciences.


Others
  • Sumerian and Akkadian in the 3rd millennium BC
    (2025). 9780199532223, Oxford University Press US.
  • in the highlands, Ethiopian Language Area
    (1976). 9780194361026, Oxford University Press.
  • and on the Comorian island of .
  • in the basin of
  • in the (northeast Europe)
  • in the Caucasus, though this is disputed
  • the and Mazandarani languages with South Caucasian languages
  • several linguistic areas of the Americas, including:
    • Mesoamerican linguistic area
    • Pueblo linguistic area
    • Northwest Coast linguistic area
  • Austronesian and Papuan languages spoken in eastern and
    (2025). 9789027231000, John Benjamins.
    Schapper, Antoinette. "Wallacea, a linguistic area". Archipel. Études interdisciplinaires sur le monde insulindien 90 (2015): 99–151.
  • East —proposed, though currently uncertain
    (2025). 9783863092863, University of Bamberg Press. .


Proposed examples
Language families that have been proposed to actually be sprachbunds

  • Pama–Nyungan languages of Australia
    (2025). 9780198299813, Oxford University Press.
  • Afro-Asiatic languages, proposed by G. W. Tsereteli to be a sprachbund rather than a language family. However, the linguistic consensus is that Afro-Asiatic is a valid language family.


See also

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