Areal feature (linguistics)
While most features of a language can be genetically traced back to an ancestor language (an earlier stage of development), areal features are the result of horizontal "contagion" from neighbouring populations of genetically unrelated languages. For linguists researching a large geographic area, it may be sometimes difficult to attribute certain features to areal influence instead of relatedness.
Examples include the prevalence of contrasting tone in East and Southeast Asia, which may have started with the Miao-Yao or Tai-Kadai languages; the occurrence of click consonants in 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
- Balkan linguistic union
- Native American languages#Linguistic areas
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).
