Part of
Language Contact and Change in the Americas: Studies in honor of Marianne MithunEdited by Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, Diane M. Hintz and Carmen Jany
[Studies in Language Companion Series 173] 2016
► pp. 363–384
Edited by Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, Diane M. Hintz and Carmen Jany
[Studies in Language Companion Series 173] 2016
► pp. 363–384
Measuring language typicality, with special reference to the Americas
Bernard Comrie | Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and University of California, Santa BarbaraThe World Atlas of Language Structures provides a means of calculating the index of typicality of a language, as the average of the percentage of the world’s languages that share that language’s feature value for each feature. Concentrating on languages represented by at least 100 features gives a sample of 115 languages, including 29 indigenous languages of the Americas. While indigenous languages of the Americas occupy a broad range on the index of typicality, from positions 13 to 115 – in contrast to Indo-European languages of Europe, which all fall well within the bottom half of the range – there are some striking more local results, e.g., languages of interior Amazonia fall in the “very atypical” range of 107 to 115.
References (8)
Cysouw, Michael. 2011. Quantitative explorations of the worldwide distribution of rare characteristics, or: the exceptionality of northwestern European languages. In Expecting the Unexpected: Exceptions in Grammar [Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 216], Horst J. Simon & Heike Wiese (eds), 411-432. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 
Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin. 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, <[URL]> (05 June 2015).
Haspelmath, Martin, Dryer, Matthew S., Gil, David & Comrie, Bernard. 2005. The World Atlas of Language Structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Johanson, Lars. 2002. Structural Factors in Turkic Language Contacts. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. (German original: 1992.Strukturelle Faktoren in türkischen Sprachkontakten. [Sitzungsberichte der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main 29.5]. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.)
Maddieson, Ian. 2013. Absence of common consonants. In The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds). Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, <[URL]> (05 June 2015).
Mithun, Marianne. 2012a. Core argument patterns and deep genetic relations: Hierarchical systems in Northern California. In Typology of Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations [Studies in Language Companion Series 126], Pirkko Suihkonen, Bernard Comrie & Valery Solvyev (eds), 257-294. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2012b. Questionable relatives. In Relative Clauses in Languages of the Americas: A Typological Overview [Typological Studies in Language 102], Bernard Comrie & Zarina Estrada (eds), 269-300. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Trudgill, Peter. 2009. Sociolinguistic typology and complexification. In Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable [Studies in the Evolution of Language 13], Geoffrey Sampson, David Gil & Peter Trudgill (eds), 98-109. Oxford: Oxford University Press.