Sprachbund

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Not to be confused with the sociolinguistic term sprechbund.

A sprachbund (/ˈsprɑːkbʊnd/; German: [ˈʃpʁaːxbʊnt], "federation of languages") – also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, 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.

History

In a 1904 paper, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay emphasised the need to distinguish between language similarities arising from a genetic relationship and those arising from convergence due to language contact.[1] The term Sprachbund, a calque of the Russian term языковой союз (yazykovoy soyuz; "language union"), was introduced by Nikolai Trubetzkoy in an article in 1923. In a paper presented to the 1st International Congress of Linguists in 1928, Trubetzkoy defined a sprachbund 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.[1] Later workers, starting with Trubetzkoy's colleague Roman Jakobson, have relaxed the requirement of similarities in all four of the areas stipulated by Trubetzkoy.[2][3][4]

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.[citation needed]

Examples

The Balkans

Main article: Balkan sprachbund

The idea of areal convergence is commonly attributed to Jernej Kopitar's description in 1830 of Albanian, Bulgarian and Romanian as giving the impression of "nur eine Sprachform ... mit dreierlei Sprachmaterie", which has been rendered by Victor Friedman as "one grammar with the three lexicons".[5][6] The Balkan sprachbund comprises Albanian, Romanian, the South Slavic languages of the southern Balkans (Bulgarian, 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.[3][6]

Indian subcontinent

In a classic 1956 paper titled "India as a Linguistic Area", 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.[7]

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.[3][8][9]

Southeast Asia

The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area is one of the most dramatic of linguistic areas in terms of the surface similarity of the languages involved, to the extent that early linguists tended to group them all into a single family, although the modern consensus places them into numerous unrelated families. The area stretches from Thailand to China and is home to speakers of languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Tai-Kadai, Austronesian (represented by Chamic) and Mon–Khmer families.[10]

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 (Mon–Khmer). Most of these languages passed through an earlier stage with three tones on most syllables (but no tonal distinctions on checked syllables 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 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.[10] Similarly, the unrelated Khmer (Mon–Khmer), Cham (Austronesian) and Lao (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 affixes, though a number of Mon–Khmer languages have derivational morphology. Shared syntactic features include classifiers, object–verb order and topic–comment structure, though in each case there are exceptions in branches of one or more families.[10]

Northern Asia

Some linguists think the Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic families of northern Asia are genetically related, in a group they call Altaic, often also including Korean and Japonic. Others dispute this, attributing common features such as vowel harmony to areal diffusion.[11]

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 the normal consonants they are today.[12]

Others

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Chirikba, Viacheslav A. (2008), "The problem of the Caucasian Sprachbund", in Muysken, Pieter, From linguistic areas to areal linguistics, John Benjamins Publishing, pp. 25–94, ISBN 978-90-272-3100-0. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Tuite, Kevin (1999), "The myth of the Caucasian Sprachbund: The case of ergativity", Lingua 108 (1): 1–29, doi:10.1016/S0024-3841(98)00037-0. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Thomason, Sarah (2000), "Linguistic areas and language history", in Gilbers, Dicky; Nerbonne, John; Schaeken, Jos, Languages in Contact, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 311–327, ISBN 978-90-420-1322-3. 
  4. ↑ Campbell, Lyle (2002), "Areal Linguistics: a Closer Scrutiny", 5th NWCL International Conference: Linguistic Areas, Convergence, and Language Change. 
  5. ↑ Friedman, Victor A. (1997), "One Grammar, Three Lexicons: Ideological Overtones and Underpinnings in the Balkan Sprachbund", Papers from the 33rd Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago Linguistic Society. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Friedman, Victor A. (2000), "After 170 years of Balkan Linguistics: Whither the Millennium?", Mediterranean Language Review 12: 1–15. 
  7. ↑ Emeneau, Murray (1956), "India as a Linguistic Area", Language 32 (1): 3–16, doi:10.2307/410649. 
  8. ↑ Emeneau, Murray; Dil, Anwar (1980), Language and Linguistic Area: Essays by Murray B. Emeneau, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, ISBN 978-0-8047-1047-3. 
  9. ↑ Thomason, Sarah Grey (2001), Language contact, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 114–117, ISBN 978-0-7486-0719-8. 
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Enfield, N.J. (2005), "Areal Linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia", Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (1): 181–206, doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.34.081804.120406. 
  11. ↑ Schönig, Claus (2003), "Turko-Mongolic Relations", in Janhunen, Juha, The Mongolic Languages, London: Routledge, pp. 403–419, ISBN 978-0-7007-1133-8. 
  12. ↑ Maddieson, Ian (2003), "The sounds of the Bantu languages", in Nurse, Derek; Philippson, Gérard, The Bantu languages, Routledge, pp. 15–41, ISBN 978-0-7007-1134-5 , pp. 31–32.
  13. ↑ Deutscher, Guy (2007), Syntactic Change in Akkadian: The Evolution of Sentential Complementation, Oxford University Press US, pp. 20–21, ISBN 978-0-19-953222-3. 
  14. ↑ Haspelmath, Martin; König, Ekkehard; Oesterreicher, Wulf et al., eds. (2001), "The European linguistic area: Standard Average European", Language typology and language universals, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 1492–1510, ISBN 978-3-11-017154-9. 
  15. ↑ Dixon, R.M.W. (2001), "The Australian Linguistic Area", in Dixon, R.M.W; Aikhenvald, Alexandra, Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics, Oxford University Press, pp. 64–104, ISBN 978-0-19-829981-3. 
  16. ↑ Campbell, Lyle; Kaufman, Terrence; Smith-Stark, Thomas C. (1986), "Meso-America as a Linguistic Area", Language 62 (3): 530–570, doi:10.2307/415477. 
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