Abstract
Areal linguistics explores the distribution of linguistic traits across geographic space and across language boundaries, with the goal of understanding the dynamics of processes such as language contact, language spread, and language replacement. In Americanist linguistics, the languages of California have been of special interest for arealist scholarship. This chapter reviews the history of areal linguistics in California and discusses some significant recent contributions that explore psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic factors in “trait sprawl” and attend to functional/pragmatic traits as well as formal ones. Several case studies that illustrate different historical processes underlying trait distributions in California are original to this chapter. Theoretical advances in areal linguistics are reviewed, with special attention to challenges to the concept of a “linguistic area”, and to the need for historicist explanations of trait distributions.
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