Areal feature linguistics: Encyclopedia - Areal feature linguistics

Areal feature (linguistics)

In linguistics, an areal feature is any typological feature shared by languages within the same geographical area.

Resemblances between two or more languages (whether typological or in vocabulary) can be due to genetic relation (descent from a common ancestor language), or due to borrowing at some time in the past between languages that were not necessarily genetically related. When little or no direct documentation of ancestor languages is available, it can be hard to determine whether a similarity is genetic or areal.

Examples include the prevalence of contrasting phonemic tone in East and Southeast Asia, which may have started with the Miao-Yao or Tai-Kadai languages; the occurrence of click consonants in Bantu languages of southern Africa, which originated in the Khoisan languages; the lack of a [p] in many of the languages around the Sahara, such as Arabic; the lack of fricatives in Australian languages; the prevalence of ejective lateral affricates in the Pacific Northwest of North America; the spread of the uvular R from French to several Germanic languages; the use of the plural pronoun as a polite word for you in much of Europe (the tu-vous distinction); and the spread of a verb-final word order to the Austronesian languages of New Guinea.

See also

• Sprachbund
• Comparative method
• Mass lexical comparison

Examples:

• Balkan linguistic union
• Native American languages#Linguistic areas
• East Asian language#Areal linguistic features
• African languages#Linguistic features
• Australian Aboriginal languages#Common features

Areal feature linguistics - Bibliography

• 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).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Areal feature linguistics", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki