An areal feature, in linguistics, is the appearance of a given feature of typology in several unrelated languages due to the influence of geographical closeness. Broadly conceived, linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ...

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 Bantu languages of 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. This article or section uses Ruby annotation. ... The Hmong-Mien or Miao-Yao languages are a language family of southern China and Southeast Asia. ... The Tai-Kadai languages are a language family found in Southeast Asia and southern China. ... Clicks are stops produced with two articulatory closures in the oral cavity. ... Map showing the distribution of the Khoi-San languages. ... Arabic (العربية) is a Semitic language, closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. ... Fricative consonants are produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together (e. ... The Australian Aboriginal languages are a Australia, and the rest are descended linguistically from them. ... Ejective consonants are a class of consonants which may contrast with aspirated or unaspirated consonants in a language. ... A lateral affricate is an affricate with a lateral consonant. ... Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. ... The Germanic languages form one of the branches of the Indo-European (IE) language family, spoken by the Germanic peoples who settled in northern Europe along the borders of the Roman Empire. ... In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the general order of words in a languages sentences: Sam oranges ate. The SOV type is the most common type found in natural languages. ... The Austronesian languages are a family of languages widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia. ...

See also

• Sprachbund
• Balkan linguistic union
• Native American languages#Linguistic areas
• East Asian language#Areal linguistic features
• African languages#Linguistic features
• Australian Aboriginal languages#Common features

A Sprachbund (German for language union) (also known as linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area) is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity. ... Balkan linguistic union or Balkan sprachbund is a name given to the similarities in grammar, syntax, vocabulary and phonology found in the languages of the Balkans. ... Native American languages are the indigenous languages of the Americas, spoken from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America. ... East Asian languages are languages particularly identified with extensive employment of Chinese characters instead of, for example, the Roman alphabet. ... The term African languages refers to the approximately 1800 languages spoken in Africa. ... The Australian Aboriginal languages are a Australia, and the rest are descended linguistically from them. ...

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).