Sprachbund

· from German

What is a Sprachbund?

A Sprachbund is a group of languages that share features through long contact rather than common ancestry; mainland Southeast Asia is a classic example.

Chinese, Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, Khmer and Hmong come from different families but share traits such as classifiers, serial verbs, SVO order and isolating morphology, and most are tonal. These shared features make some structures transfer surprisingly well between them.

Examples

Classifiers in Mandarin, Thai and Vietnamese; serial verbs in Thai and Chinese; tones in Thai, Lao and Vietnamese (but not Khmer)

Kungfucius says: Languages that were neighbours long enough to start dressing alike.