Linguistic Areas

“Linguistic areas” are defined as social spaces (regions, countries, (sub-)continents) in which languages from different families have influenced each other significantly, leading to striking or remarkable structural resemblances across genealogical boundaries. Since the early work of Trubetskoj and his contemporaries, work on other parts of the world, for example the Indian subcontinent, has unveiled a number of other regions where contact between languages has led to convergence, and thus the general field of areal linguistics has developed. This article surveys the different proposals for linguistic areas roughly continent by continent, and then lists a number of general overviews and contributions in textbooks and handbooks. As the notion of “linguistic area” was further developed, a number of definitional and theoretical issues came up. During most of the past century, linguistic areas were thought of as something special, out of the ordinary. In addition, the view arose that there were regions which qualified as linguistic areas and others which did not. At the beginning of the 1990s awareness grew that many linguistic patterns and features, both typological and historical, could and should be studied in an areal perspective. This areal turn led to a reconceptualization of many of the issues involved in areal linguistic studies, many of them involving problems of scale and operationalization. Even though the notion of “linguistic area” has been much criticized in the strict sense, the areal perspective keeps gaining ground in the study of the distribution of linguistic features. A final section of this survey will be devoted to psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic mechanisms and scenarios leading to linguistic areas. While earlier approaches had been mostly structural and historical, recent work in areal linguistics tries to bridge the gap with meso-level language contact studies: how do languages actually converge and what are the mechanisms promoting or blocking this type of convergence? Languages do not converge by themselves; rather, it is the agency or unconscious behavior of speakers that has this effect.