Everything about Sprachbund totally explained
A
Sprachbund (in German, plural
Sprachbünde [ˈʃpraːxˌbʏndə]), from the
German word for “language union” (lit. “language-bunch/truss”), also known as a
linguistic area,
convergence area, or
diffusion area, 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.
One clear example instance 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 no longer believed to be related to the
Sino-Tibetan family or even to each other.
In Europe, the so-called
Balkan sprachbund comprises
Albanian,
Romanian, the
South Slavic languages of the southern Balkan (
Bulgarian with
Macedonian and to a lesser degree
Serbo-Croatian),
Greek, and
Romani. All these are
Indo-European languages but from very different branches. Yet they've 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 and Slavic languages. According to the first researcher of the
Balkan sprachbund, K. Sandfeld, most of the linguistic innovations shared by the members of the Balkan Sprachbund originate from
Greek during the time of Byzantine predominance in the Balkans. However, this view isn't universally accepted.
Likewise, the Romance and Germanic languages of Western Europe (other than English) 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.
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're part of a sprachbund.
Other sprachbünde can be found:
Areal features are common features of a group of languages in a Sprachbund.
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 irease.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Sprachbund'.
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