Sprachbund
A
Sprachbund (pronounced // plural form
Sprachbünde //,
German for
language league, also known as a
linguistic area,
convergence area,
diffusion area) is a group of
languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity. They may be
genetically unrelated, or only distantly related. Where genetic affiliations are unclear, the Sprachbund characteristics might give a false appearance of relatedness.
One clear example instance is the
East Asian Sprachbund, in which many languages of
South-East Asia, including
Thai and
Vietnamese, have taken on the appearance of neighbouring languages like
Chinese, with monosyllabic words and distinctive tones. Yet Thai and Vietnamese are no longer believed to be related to the
Sino-Tibetan family or even to each other.
In Europe, the
Balkan linguistic union is comprised of
Albanian,
Romanian, the
South Slavic languages of the southern Balkan (
Macedonian,
Bulgarian and to a lesser degree
Serbian),
Greek, and
Romani. All these are
Indo-European languages but from very different branches. Yet they share several grammatical features, 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 and Slavic languages. Likewise, the Romance and Germanic languages of Western Europe (other than English) share many features due to interaction. Similarly there are also features common to languages situated in Europe that are not found in Indo-European languages spoken in India and Iran, but are found in the
Uralic languages. This is because of the great migrations across Europe.
Many linguists think the
Mongolian,
Turkic, and
Manchu-Tungus families of northern Asia are genetically related, in a group they call
Altaic, but the evidence is equivocal, and their common features such as
vowel harmony might instead mean they are part of a Sprachbund.
Other Sprachbunds can be found:
* in the
Ethiopian highlands
* in the
Sepik River basin of
New Guinea* in South Asia (i.e. the Indian subcontinent)
* in the
Baltics (northeast Europe)
* in the
Caucasus* covering the
Australian continent (prior to European settlement)
* throughout the
Americas (e.g. the Pacific Northwest Coast and Mesoamerica).
** (
see Native American languages#Linguistic areas)
Areal features are common features of a group of languages in a Sprachbund. A
dialect continuum describes a group of
dialects spoken across a geographical area, differing only slightly between areas that are geographically close, and gradually decreasing in
mutual intelligibility as distances increase.
*
Language convergence*
Language merger* Campbell, Lyle. (In press). Areal linguistics. In K. Brown (Ed.),
Encyclopedia of language and lingustics (2nd ed.). Oxford: Elsevier. (Online version: http://www.linguistics.utah.edu/Faculty/campbell/CampbellArealLingEnc.doc).
