A Sprachbund (German for language bond, also known as a linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area) is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity. They may be genetically unrelated or only distantly related. Where genetic affiliations are unclear, the Sprachbund characteristics might give a false appearance of relatedness. Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ...

One clear example instance is the East Asian Sprachbund, in which many languages of East Asia 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. East Asian languages or the East Asian sprachbund describe two notional groupings of languages in East and Southeast Asia, either (1) languages which have been greatly influenced by Classical Chinese, or the CJKV Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) area or (2) a larger grouping including the CJKV area as well... Location of Southeast Asia Southeast Asia is a subregion of Asia. ... Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family of about 250 languages of East Asia, in number of speakers worldwide second only to Indo-European. ...

In Europe, the Balkan linguistic union: Albanian, Bulgarian and Romanian are all Indo-European but from very different branches. Yet they share several grammatical features, such as a postposed definite article, avoidance of infinitive and future tense formation, and others. This does not occur in languages closely related to Romanian or to Bulgarian. Likewise, the Romance and Germanic languages of Western Europe share many features due to interaction. Balkan linguistic union or Balkansprachbund is a name given to the similarities in grammar, syntax, vocabulary and phonology found in the languages of the Balkans, which belong to various Indo-European branches, such as Albanian, Greek, Romance and Slavic. ... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies Indo-European is originally a linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. ... Definite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzards 1996 performance released on video and CD. The video/DVD and CD performances were both recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, England. ... In grammar, the infinitive is the form of a verb that has no inflection to indicate person, number, mood or tense. ... In linguistics, a future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by a verb as not having happened yet, but expected to in the future. ...

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 are part of a Sprachbund. The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken across a vast area from Eastern Europe to Siberia and Western China with an estimated 200 - 250 million speakers. ... Tungusic languages (or Manchu-Tungus languages) are spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria. ... Altaic is a proposed language family which includes 60 languages spoken by about 250 million people, mostly in and around Central Asia and Far East. ... Vowel harmony (also metaphony) is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels. ...

Other Sprachbunds can be found

• in the Ethiopian highlands
• in the Sepik River basin of New Guinea
• in South Asia (i.e. the Indian subcontinent)
• in the Baltics (northeast Europe)
• covering the Australian continent (prior to European settlement)
• throughout the Americas (e.g. the Pacific Northwest Coast and Mesoamerica).
  • (see Native American languages#Linguistic areas)

Areal features are common features of a group of languages in a Sprachbund. A dialect continuum describes a group of dialects spoken across a geographical area, differing only slightly between areas that are geographically close, and gradually decreasing in mutual intelligibility as distances increase. The Sepik River is the longest river in Papua New Guinea. ... The Baltic Sea The Baltic states, or Baltic countries, is a term which usually refers to three countries to the East of the Baltic Sea: Estonia Latvia Lithuania It ought to be noted that although the present-day Baltic countries are republics, the term Baltic Republics refers to the same... World map showing the Americas The Americas commonly refers to the landmass in the Western Hemisphere consisting of the continents of North America and South America with their associated islands. ... Native American languages are the indigenous languages of the Americas, spoken by Native Americans from the southern tip of South America to Alaska and Greenland. ... 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. ... A dialect continuum is a range of dialects spoken across a large geographical area, differing only slightly between areas that are geographically close, and gradually decreasing in mutual intelligibility as the distances become greater. ... A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος, dialektos) is a variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic area. ... A pair of languages is said to be mutually intelligible if speakers of one language can readily understand the other language. ...

References

• 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).