Abstract
Languages of diverse structures and different families tend to share common patterns if they are spoken in geographic proximity. This convergence is often explained by horizontal diffusibility, which is typically ascribed to language contact. In such a scenario, speakers of two or more languages interact and influence each other’s languages, and in this interaction, more grammaticalized features tend to be more resistant to diffusion compared to features of more lexical content. An alternative explanation is vertical heritability: languages in proximity often share genealogical descent. Here, we suggest that the geographic distribution of features globally can be explained by two major pathways, which are generally not distinguished within quantitative typological models: feature diffusion and language expansion. The first pathway corresponds to the contact scenario described above, while the second occurs when speakers of genetically related languages migrate. We take the worldwide distribution of nominal classification systems (grammatical gender, noun class, and classifier) as a case study to show that more grammaticalized systems, such as gender, and less grammaticalized systems, such as classifiers, are almost equally widespread, but the former spread more by language expansion historically, whereas the latter spread more by feature diffusion. Our results indicate that quantitative models measuring the areal diffusibility and stability of linguistic features are likely to be affected by language expansion that occurs by historical coincidence. We anticipate that our findings will support studies of language diversity in a more sophisticated way, with relevance to other parts of language, such as phonology.
Highlights
Languages of diverse structures and different families tend to share common patterns if they are spoken in geographic proximity
The distribution of linguistic features in the more than 7000 languages of the world (Hammarström, 2016; Hammarström et al, 2019) reflects a scenario where some features may have emerged and spread by horizontal diffusion, whereas others are represented by vertical stability within their lineage
While the distribution of every linguistic feature is likely to be shaped by both horizontal diffusion and vertical stability, few analyses based on real data have been proposed to examine how these two pathways simultaneously shape the distribution of specific language features in languages of the world
Summary
Languages of diverse structures and different families tend to share common patterns if they are spoken in geographic proximity. The existing literature suggests that, on the one hand, classifiers are more diffused (horizontally) across language families than gender and noun class (Nichols, 1992: 32, 2003; Wichmann and Holman, 2009: 54–55; Seifart, 2010; Greenhill et al, 2017).
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