The Balkan sprachbund in
typological-geographical space
DOI:10.30842/alp2306573716211
Nichols J. The Balkan sprachbund in
typological-geographical space. Acta Linguistica
Petropolitana. 2020. XVI(2): 306–330.
The Balkan sprachbund is known to its specialists as distinctive
and made up of languages that are closely similar, a view that can
best be assessed by typological comparison. This paper compares
three different western Eurasian sprachbunds — Balkan,
Circum-Baltic, and the Avar sphere in the Caucasus — to each other
and to the larger sets of western Eurasia, all of northern Eurasia,
and all of the northern hemisphere. The typological properties
compared are six complex typological macrofeatures each consisting
of a set of related features. They capture some of the classic
Balkan features and some deep-seated typological traits, and they
enable us to place the Balkan area in the larger typological and
linguistic-geographical map of Eurasia. Mapped in typological
space, the Balkan languages prove to be discrete as a set and to
form a compact cluster at or even beyond the edge of the European
typological space. That is, the Balkan sprachbund occupies an apex
position, hyper-European or even ultra-European, in a typological
map of Eurasia. In these respects it differs from the Circum-Baltic
area and in some respects resembles the Avar sphere, which is also
very compact and often peripheral or extreme in the Caucasus. The
Balkan-Avar similarities and differences can be accounted for by
similarities and differences in the sociolinguistics of the two
areas. The main general conclusion is that the Balkan sprachbund is
essential to understanding the linguistic geography and typology of
all of Europe. Issues for future research are testing the
robustness of the hyper-European characterization by surveying more
features, and determining whether the Balkan sprachbund is leading
the evolution of a European linguistic profile or is a zone of
peripheral archaisms in an evolutionary process trending in the
opposite direction.
Keywords
sprachbund, language area, Balkan,
Circum-Baltic, Avar sphere, linguistic typology, causative,
causal-noncausal pair, inflectional person category, noun-based
language, verb-based language, event structure, linguistic
complexity, finite verb
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Keywords
sprachbund, language area, Balkan,
Circum-Baltic, Avar sphere, linguistic typology, causative,
causal-noncausal pair, inflectional person category, noun-based
language, verb-based language, event structure, linguistic
complexity, finite verb
