Implication of the Geographical Axis for international scale language research

Abstract

The research of the article is based on theories that analyse the links between geography and linguistics. A core theory in the analysis is Diamond's (1999, Chapter 7) idea of the different population histories of continental areas, Güldemann (2008, 2010) speculatively proposed that macro-areal aggregations of linguistic features might be influenced by large-scale geographical factors. In line with Diamond’s geographical axis hypothesis, it is assumed that the way linguistic features assemble periods time spans and large geographical space is determined among other things by two factors which potentially are the “latitude spread potential” and the “longitude spread the constraint.” This paper reports on first results of evaluating this concerning the first factor, we argue that contact-induced feature distributions as well as genealogically defined language groups that have a sufficient geographical extension tend to have a latitudinal orientation. Regarding the second factor, provide the first results suggesting that linguistic diversity within language families tends to be higher along the longitude axis. If these findings can be replicated by more extensive and diverse testing, they promise to become important ingredients for a comprehensive theory of human history across space and time within linguistics and beyond.