South Asia as a Sociolinguistic Area

Abstract

Abstract In 1956, Emeneau’s article, ‘India as a Linguistic Area’ appeared in Language, and it was followed by a number of additional studies, by Emeneau and others, of features of language STRUCTURE widely shared throughout South Asia that set that area apart from other regions of the world (e.g. Andronov 1964, Emeneau 1974, Kuiper 1967, Masica 1976, Ramanujan and Masica 1969). In all these studies the concept of Sprachbund or linguistic area was used in its established meaning of a multilingual area having languages of different families, in which many of the shared structural features are held to represent convergence that has resulted from long periods of language contact. This kind of ‘areal’ similarity that arises from mutual influences is contrasted with ‘genetic’ similarity between languages, which results from communicative continuity from a single origin at an earlier point in time. Thus, certain present day similarities between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages of South Asia in phonology, inflectional categories, syntax, an lexical semantics do not go back to similarities between Old lndo-Aryan and Proto-Dravidian but have resulted from lexical borrowing, Ll-L2 language transfer, and other processes operative in long term bilingualisms.