Sprachbund

The introduction of the new term Proto-Munda is justified by the fact that, as early as the Vedic period, the Munda languages had departed considerably from the Austro-Asiatic type of language and developed a character of their own brought about by a number of dialectal phonetic changes and the introduction of suffixes in the word-formation. Both phenomena mark the beginning of a process of "Dravidization" of the Munda tongues which has ultimately given them the character of agglutinating languages and has thus contributed to the growth of the Indian linguistic league (Sprachbund).

[…] Certainly it is 'nicer' to define a sprachbund by what appear to be exclusively shared features with differentiate it from its neighbors – just as it is 'nicer' to be able to define a dialect by a set of innovations which clearly mark it off from other, related dialects. In the case of dialect continua, it has been known for a long time that this approach is unrealistic and historically inaccurate […]

The linguist reader will recognize that the Takia/Waskia, Mixe Basque/Gascon, Romansch/Swiss German and Sauris German/Friulian pairs each form a small Sprachbund ('language alliance'). Probably the best-known Sprachbund consists of modern Greek, Albanian, Romanian, and the southern Slav languages Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Croatian, which through centuries of contact have undergone metatypy to the extent that there are very close semantic and syntactic […]

Substantial work has been done to define sprachbunds, with the result that there now are a few regions in all major macro-regions of the world that can be defined in terms of language contact. With regard to defining sprachbunds, two different stances can be distinguished. On the one hand it is argued that a definition of sprachbunds should highlight the fact that they are the result of language contact, that is, of historical processes; […] On the other hand, sprachbunds are defined exclusively in terms of linguistic parameters without reference to the historical forces that gave rise to them.

The research program took shape after the Pragian structuralists made public their definition of the concept of Sprachbund. Since then various hypotheses have been put forward as to the subdivision of the continent into a number of distinct areas which are commonly termed Sprachbünde, linguistic areas or contact superposition zones[…].