LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS THE KEY CONCEPTS

LINGUISTIC AREA
A geographical region in which several unrelated or distantly related languages have striking
characteristics in common. With only a very few exceptions, speakers of a language are
always in contact with neighbours speaking different languages, and they have dealings with
those neighbours. The resulting language contact means that words, speech sounds and
even grammatical forms may pass from some languages into neighbouring languages. This
is exceedingly common.
In certain cases, however, this contact may be so intense that a number of striking
characteristics diffuse throughout a geographical region, becoming prominent in a number
of languages which are unrelated or only distantly related. As a result, the languages in
question may, in some respects, undergo convergence: they come to resemble one another
more closely than they resemble their closest linguistic relatives in other regions. This state
of affairs we call a linguistic area or, using the German term, a Sprachbund.
Several linguistic areas have been identified by linguists, among them south-east Asia and
the Balkans. South-east Asia is a particularly striking case. Many languages in this area
including Burmese, Thai and Vietnamese are so similar in their structures that linguists
believed for a while that they must all be related in a single family. But careful investigation
has revealed that they are not discoverably related to each other at all; they all have true
relatives elsewhere which are not very similar to them, and the striking resemblances result
purely from convergence among neighbouring but unrelated languages.
In the Balkans, Greek and Albanian constitute distinct branches of the Indo-European family,
while Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian belong to the distinct Slavic branch of
IndoEuropean, and Turkish is not Indo-European at all. Yet all these languages participate to
varying degrees in a language area: they share with one another a range of grammatical
characteristics which they do not share with their closest relatives elsewhere.
The study of language areas is called areal linguistics.
See also: language contact