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Areal feature

In geolinguistics, areal features are elements shared by languages or dialects in a geographic area,[1] particularly when such features are not descended from a proto-language, i.e. a common ancestor language. That is, an areal feature is contrasted with lingual-genealogically determined similarity within the same language family. Features may diffuse from one dominant language to neighbouring languages (see "sprachbund").

Genetic relationships are represented in the family tree model of language change, and areal relationships are represented in the wave model.

Characteristics[edit]

Resemblances between two or more languages (whether in typology or in vocabulary) have been observed to result from several mechanisms, including lingual genealogical relation (descent from a common ancestor language, not principally related to biological genetics); borrowing between languages; retention of features when a population adopts a new language; and chance coincidence. When little or no direct documentation of ancestor languages is available, determining whether the similarity is genetic or merely areal can be difficult. Edward Sapir notably used evidence of contact and diffusion as a negative tool for genetic reconstruction, treating it as a subject in its own right only at the end of his career (e.g., for the influence of Tibetan on Tocharian).[2]

Major models[edit]

William Labov in 2007 reconciled the tree and wave models in a general framework based on differences between children and adults in their language learning ability. Adults do not preserve structural features with sufficient regularity to establish a norm in their community, but children do. Linguistic features are diffused across an area by contacts among adults. Languages branch into dialects and thence into related languages through small changes in the course of children's learning processes which accumulate over generations, and when speech communities do not communicate (frequently) with each other, these cumulative changes diverge.[3] Diffusion of areal features for the most part hinges on low-level phonetic shifts, whereas tree-model transmission includes in addition structural factors such as "grammatical conditioning, word boundaries, and the systemic relations that drive chain shifting".[4]

Sprachbund[edit]

In some areas with high linguistic diversity, a number of areal features have spread across a set of languages to form a sprachbund (also known as a linguistic area, convergence area or diffusion area). Some examples are the Balkan sprachbund, the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, and the languages of the Indian subcontinent.

The spread of the from either German or French to several Northern European languages.

guttural R

Contrast between /ɫ/ () and palatalized /lʲ/ in Slavic, Baltic and Turkic languages of Central Asia.

dark L

Development of a three- system with no tones in words ending in -p, -t, -k, followed by a tone split, and many other phonetic similarities in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area.

tone

in the Burushaski,[5][6] Nuristani,[7] Dravidian, Munda,[8] and Indo-Aryan families of South Asia.

Retroflex consonants

The occurrence of in several languages of Southern Africa, including a few Bantu languages

click consonants

The lack of in Australian languages.

fricatives

The use of and aspirated consonants in the languages of the Caucasus.

ejective

The prevalence of and lateral fricatives and affricates in the Pacific Northwest of North America.

ejective

The development of a in the Bearnese dialect of Occitan and the Souletin dialect of Basque.

close front rounded vowel

The absence of [] and presence of [v] in many languages of Central and Eastern Europe.

w

The lack of in languages of the Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula.

nasal consonants

The absence of [] but presence of [b] and [f] in many languages of Northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.

p

The presence of a voicing contrast on fricatives e.g. [] vs [z] in Europe and Southwestern Asia.

s

An between dialects with and without phonemic /y/ in Europe cutting across the boundary between Romance and Germanic dialect continua.

isogloss

Comparative method

Language contact

Linguistic typology

Linkage (linguistics)

Mass comparison

Wave model

World Atlas of Language Structures

. (1992). Reduplication in South Asian Languages: An Areal, Typological, and Historical Study. India: Allied Publishers.

Abbi, Anvita

Blevins, Juliette. (2017). Areal sound patterns: From perceptual magnets to stone soup. In R. Hickey (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (pp. 88–121). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

(2006). "Areal linguistics: A closer scrutiny". In Matras, Yaron; McMahon, April; Vincent, Nigel (eds.). Linguistic areas: Convergence in historical and typological perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1–31. Archived from the original on 2011-07-16. Retrieved 2016-10-17.

Campbell, Lyle

Campbell, Lyle (2006). . In Brown, Keith (ed.). Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (2nd ed.). Oxford: Elsevier. pp. 1.455–460. Archived from the original on 2012-03-13. Retrieved 2010-09-25.

"Areal linguistics"

Chappell, Hilary. (2001). Language contact and areal diffusion in Sinitic languages. In A. Y. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon (Eds.), Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics (pp. 328–357). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Enfield, N. J. (2005). Areal Linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia. Annual Review of Anthropology, 34, 181–206.

Haas, Mary R. (1978). Language, culture, and history, essays by Mary R. Haas, selected and introduced by Anwar S. Dil. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Haas, Mary R. (June 1978). Prehistory of Languages. The Hague: de Gruyter Mouton. p. 120.  978-90-279-0681-6.

ISBN

Hickey, Raymond, ed. (2017). The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kirby, James & Brunelle, Marc. (2017). Southeast Asian Tone in Areal Perspective. In R. Hickey (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (pp. 703–731). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

. (1999). Tibeto-Burman tonology in an areal context. In Proceedings of the symposium Crosslinguistic studies of tonal phenomena: Tonogenesis, Japanese Accentology, and Other Topics (pp. 3–31). Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.

Matisoff, J. A