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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 language contact. 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. ISBN 9780444863119
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 calque of this term, Sprachbund, defining it as a group of languages with similarities in syntax, 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 Roman Jakobson, 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.
The Balkan Sprachbund comprises Albanian, Romanian, the South Slavic languages of the southern Balkans (Bulgarian, Macedonian and to a lesser degree Serbo-Croatian), Greek language, Balkan Turkish language, and Romani language.
All but one of these are Indo-European languages but from very divergent branches, and Turkish is a Turkic language. Yet they have exhibited several signs of grammatical convergence, such as avoidance of the infinitive, future tense 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.
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, Tai languages (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 stop consonant), which was followed by a tone split 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 Khmer language (Mon–Khmer), Cham language (Austronesian) and Lao language (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 inflection or , though a number of Mon–Khmer languages have derivational morphology. Shared syntactic features include classifiers, OV language and topic–comment structure, though in each case there are exceptions in branches of one or more families.
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, Munda languages and Tibeto-Burman. 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. ISBN 9780804710473
The Qinghai–Gansu sprachbund, in the northeastern part of the Tibetan plateau spanning the Chinese provinces of Qinghai and Gansu, is an area of interaction between varieties of northwest Mandarin Chinese, Amdo Tibetan and Mongolic and Turkic languages.
Whorf likely considered Romance and West Germanic to form the core of the SAE, i.e. the literary languages of Europe which have seen substantial cultural influence from Latin during the Medieval Latin. The North Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages tend to be more peripheral members.
Alexander Gode, who was instrumental in the development of Interlingua, characterized it as "Standard Average European". The Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages 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 language contact in the time of the Migration Period "Language Typology and Language Universals" accessed 2015-10-13 and later, continuing during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. 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.
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