Areal Feature - Examples

Examples

  • the use of the plural pronoun as a polite word for you in much of Europe (the tu-vous distinction)
  • the spread of the guttural R from French to several West European languages.
  • the tendency to use a habeo (transitive, e.g. "I have") construction for possession in much of Europe, instead of a mihi est (to me is) construction, which is more likely the original possessive construction in Proto-Indo-European, considering the lack of a common root for "have" verbs
  • the development of a perfect tense using "have" + past participle in many European languages (Romance, Germanic, etc.)
  • presence of /ɫ/ (dark L), usually contrasting with palatalized /lʲ/ in Slavic, Baltic and Turkic languages of Eastern Europe
  • possibly the Satem sound change
  • postposed article, avoidance of the infinitive, merging of genitive and dative, and superessive number formation in some languages of the Balkans
  • development of a three-tone system with no tones in words ending in -p, -t, -k, followed by a tone split; many other phonetic similarities; a system of classifiers/measure words; the tendency for the relative clause to precede the noun (also in South Asia) etc. in East Asian languages
  • retroflex consonants in the Burushaski, Nuristani, Dravidian, Munda, and Indo-Aryan families of the Indian subcontinent.
  • the occurrence of click consonants in Bantu languages of southern Africa, which originated in the Khoisan languages
  • the lack of fricatives in Australian languages.
  • the spread of a verb-final word order to the Austronesian languages of New Guinea.
  • the prevalence of ejective and lateral fricatives and affricates in the Pacific Northwest of North America

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