Sprachbund

A Sprachbund (German pronunciation: [ˈʃpraːxbʊnt], plural Sprachbünde [ˈʃpraːxˌbʏndə]), from the German word for “language union”, also known as a linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area or language crossroads, is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity and language contact. They may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related. Where genetic affiliations are unclear, the sprachbund characteristics might give a false appearance of relatedness. Areal features are common features of a group of languages in a Sprachbund.

Southeast Asia

One clear example 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 not believed to be related to the Sino-Tibetan family or even to each other.

Europe

In Europe, the so-called Balkan sprachbund comprises Albanian, Romanian, the South Slavic languages of the southern Balkans (Bulgarian with Macedonian and to a lesser degree Serbian), Greek, and Romani. All these are Indo-European languages but from very different branches. 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 Macedonian.

Likewise, the literary Romance and Germanic languages of Western Europe share many features due to interaction, both with one another and with Classical Latin and Greek. 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.

Indian subcontinent

In a classic 1956 paper titled "India as a Linguistic Area",^[1] Murray Emeneau 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 areal features, the result of diffusion during sustained contact.

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 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.^[2] South Asia is now recognized not only as a 'linguistic area', but also as a 'sociolinguistic area', a 'cultural area', and also as a 'translation area.'^{[citation needed]}

Northern Asia

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.

Southern Africa

The Nguni languages of Southern Africa, including Zulu and Xhosa evolved from the Bantu languages of the Congo area, which do not use clicks. During and after the Nguni migration to Southern Africa, the Nguni came into frequent contact with speakers of the Khoisan languages, which make abundant use of click sounds. Over time, the Nguni languages started to incorporate click sounds, until they became normal consonants as they are today.

Other Sprachbünde

• in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal)
• in the Ethiopian highlands, Ethiopian Language Area
• in the Sepik River basin of New Guinea
• in the Baltics (northeast Europe)
• in the Caucasus
• covering the Australian continent (prior to European settlement)^[3]
• throughout the Americas:^[4]
  • Mesoamerican linguistic area
  • Pueblo linguistic area
  • Northern Northwest Coast linguistic area

Sprachraum

In contrast, a Sprachraum (from German, “language area”), also known as a dialect continuum, describes a group of genetically related dialects spoken across a geographical area, differing in their genetic relationship only slightly between areas that are geographically close, and gradually decreasing in mutual intelligibility as distances increase.

References

See also

• Language convergence
• Language contact

Further reading

• Campbell, Lyle. (In press). Areal linguistics. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (2nd ed.). Oxford: Elsevier. (Online .DOC)