Areal Studies and Culture History: Language as a Key to the Historical Study of Culture Contact

Linguistics has long been recognized as a valuable tool in unraveling culture history. The types of historical linguistic relationships usually focused on, however, are genetic. Diffusional areal relationships provide valuable evidence of communicative contacts among groups and of the nature of this contact. Such relationships can be found in all aspects of language--syntactic-semantic, phonetic, and lexical--as well as in such uses of language as folklore. Examples are drawn from North American Indian languages.