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About how much does language typology correlate with genetic relationships among languages? For example, should we expect most Sino-Tibetan languages to be isolating, or most Indo-European languages to have a lot of fusional affixes, and so on across language families?

James Grossmann
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  • Just to clarify: by "genetic relationships" you mean things like "sister language", etc. (not the actual DNA of the speakers)? – Cerberus Apr 28 '12 at 05:46
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    @Cerberus Yes, in historical linguistics 'genetic relationship' is commonly-used in this way. Sometimes the term 'genealogical relationship' is used to avoid this confusion with biological genetics. – Gaston Ümlaut Apr 28 '12 at 09:24
  • @GastonÜmlaut: Right, I have heard it used like that, but it always seemed a bit ambiguous, as you say, so I asked just to be sure. – Cerberus Apr 30 '12 at 21:27
  • @Cerberus I think it's interesting to note that the ideas of a 'family tree', shared inheritance and descent with modification were originally developed in linguistics and later borrowed by Charles Darwin and his successors, as discussed at LanguageLog. – Gaston Ümlaut May 02 '12 at 05:49
  • @GastonÜmlaut: Oh, that is interesting, though "borrowed" sounds a bit strong: reading the quotation in the LL article, I get the impression that he simply compared the two rather than actively applying the model used in one field to another. Consider how everybody knew that animals could be bred to weaken and strengthen certain qualities, and how humans inherit certain features from their ancestors and pass them on: the general model of a family with descendants and ancestors and siblings was in common use. Darwin's comparison seems more like an illustration. – Cerberus May 02 '12 at 06:47
  • @Cerberus You're talking about the idea of change within a species, certainly something that was well understood. But the idea of linking different species together in a family tree with a common ancestor was pretty novel and in doing this he was wanting to emulate the success of linguistics in creating family trees of different languages. – Gaston Ümlaut May 02 '12 at 08:25
  • @GastonÜmlaut: Okay, but why do you say a language was compared to a species, not to an individual? Words like "sister language" seem to point to individuals. So then it would be the gradual change that occurs in languages between a mother and her daughter that makes them resemble species rather than individuals. So the "genetic" part in languages is a bit of a mixed metaphor. Did Darwin also speak of "sister species"? – Cerberus May 02 '12 at 15:40
  • @Cerberus I'm not certain about Darwin, but biologists certainly talk about 'sister species'. I'm not sure I follow what you're asking, but the whole notion of 'family tree' of languages is based on the idea of languages as individuals. Of course the reality is much more complicated, as it also is with family trees of species. – Gaston Ümlaut May 02 '12 at 23:59

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The Sino-Tibetan languages are actually a wonderful counterexample. Some are isolating; some, especially the modern Tibetan languages, are agglutinative; and the Kiranti languages are highly fusional. Some are tonal; many aren't, including Newari and several of the Tibetan languages. (Indeed, Newari phonology looks like the phonology of an Indian language: voiced and voiceless aspirated plosives, retroflex and dental consonants, phonemic vowel length, and so on.) Some are SVO, but some, including the Tibetan languages again and also Burmese, are SOV.

It's important to remember that languages don't "know" what family they're in. A feature that's been part of the language for thousands of years is just as likely to stick around, and just as likely to be lost, as a feature that was just borrowed or innovated yesterday. So for instance, yeah, Mandarin and Newari share a common ancestor several thousand years back — but now there's nothing that's constraining them to evolve in the same direction as one another. And so in fact they've diverged tremendously, Mandarin coming to look like a "typical" East Asian language and Newari like a typical South Asian language.

To the extent that genetically related languages are typologically similar, it's a result either of historical intertia or of continued contact. Over the course of 4,000 years, historical intertia only buys you so much continued similarity. So when a language family spreads out over a natural barrier (as the Sino-Tibetan family did) or across a wide area (as Indo-European did), the result is an awful lot of typological diversity among genetically-related languages.

Leah Velleman
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Not very much, and what correlation there is can plausibly be put down to length of common development.

Note for example that while Slavonic and Baltic languages retain much of the inflectional apparatus of PIE (though most nominal inflection has been lost in South Slavonic), English and the Scandinavian languages have lost most of it. They haven't quite got to the point where you'd call them isolating, but they're getting somewhere near it.

Colin Fine
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I cannot give an exact number of correlation, but the correlation between genetic relationship and typological features is strong enough to be annoying when one tries to construct an unbiased sample of the languages of the world. Picking just languages at random is not a good idea because a few very large language families (Austronesian, Niger-Kongo and Indo-Germanic) contribute a large bulk of related languages.

It is fruitful to include genetic relations between languages in typological studies, as demonstrated by Levinson, S., Greenhill, S., Gray, R., Dunn, M. (2011). Universal typological dependencies should be detectable in the history of language families. Linguistic Typology, 15(2): 509-534

Sir Cornflakes
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