Eurolinguistics


Eurolinguistics is a neologistic term for the study of the languages of Europe.
The term Eurolinguistics was first used by Norbert Reiter in 1991. Apart from a series of works dealing with only a part of the European languages, the work of Harald Haarmann pursues a "pan- or trans-European perspective". This goal is also pursued by Mario Wandruszka.
Typological questions have mainly been dealt with by the Eurolinguistischer Arbeitskreis Mannheim and the EUROTYP projects. Important sources of linguistic data for Eurolinguistic studies are the Atlas Linguarum Europae and the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures.
The internet platform EuroLinguistiX offers a bibliography of Eurolinguistic publications as well as a wiki, a discussion forum, an academic internet journal in order to address also aspects of "linguistic and cultural history", "sociology of languages", "language politics" and "intercultural communication". In 2006, Joachim Grzega published a basic reader on common features of European languages.
Also joint with the ELAMA, the EuroLSJ project by Erhard Steller tries to collect essential results of Eurolinguistics and make them usable for everyday life in Europe by transforming them into a representative standard language which wants to serve as an optimized "acquisition and memory helper" for a quicker and easier access to all languages of Europe.

Common features of European languages

Writing systems

Writing was introduced to Europe by the Greeks, and from there also brought to the Romans. There are four alphabets in regular use in the areas generally considered Europe. The Latin alphabet was developed into several scripts. In the early years of Europe, the Carolingian minuscules were the most important variety of the Latin script. From this two branches developed, the Gothic/Fracture/German tradition, which Germans used well into the 20th century, and the Italian/Italic/Antiqua/Latin tradition, still used. For some nations the integration into Europe meant giving up older scripts, e.g. the Germanic gave up the runes , the Irish the Ogham script. The Cyrillic script is the second most widespread alphabet in Europe, and was developed in the 9th century under the influence of the Greek, Latin and Glagolitic alphabets. Both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are used for multiple languages in multiple states, both inside and outside Europe. As well as these two, there are three alphabets used primarily for a single language, although they are occasionally applied to minority languages in the states from which they originate. The oldest of these alphabets is the Greek alphabet, which could be considered the progenitor of all the surviving alphabets of Europe, with the earliest recorded inscriptions appearing in the 9th century BC. The other two are both found in the Caucasus, both originating in the 5th century. The Georgian alphabet is used primarily to write Georgian, though it is also used to write the other Kartvelian languages, Svan, Mingrelian and Laz, all of which are found largely within the borders of Georgia.

Sound features

The sound systems of languages may differ considerably between languages. European languages can thus rather be characterized negatively, e.g. by the absence of click sounds. One could also think of specific prosodic features, such as tonal accents. But there are also tonal languages in Europe: Serbian and Croatian and Slovene. In Slovene, the use of the musical accent is declining though --but there are hardly any contexts where intelligibility is endangered. In Sweden Swedish there also is a pitch accent in some words, which can be meaningful, e.g. ´anden ‘the duck’ vs. ˇanden ‘the ghost, spirit’.

Grammatical features

As a general introductory remark we can distinguish between three structural types of languages:
European languages are seldom pure representatives of one type. For Modern English is a good example ; for Old English and Modern High German are good examples ; classical representatives of type are Finnish and Hungarian. If a language is not isolating, this does not necessarily mean that it has no word-order rules. Latin, Basque, Finnish and the Slavic languages have a relatively free word order, whereas many languages show more restricted rules. German and Dutch, e.g., show verb-second word-order in main clauses and verb-final order in subordinate clauses. English has subject-verb word-order, which is also preferred by the Romanic languages. Irish and Scottish Gaelic have a basic verb-initial word order.
We can also distinguish between analytic constructions and synthetic constructions, e.g. the house of the man vs. the mans house.
Apart from the points already mentioned, the categories of aspect and gender are noteworthy. Under the category of aspect linguists basically understand the distinction between perfective actions and imperfective actions. The Slavic languages have a fine and rigid aspect system; in English there's the distinction between progressive and non-progressive and a distinction between present perfect and past; in the Romanic languages the imperfect serves to denote background actions.
The most current gender systems in Europe are twofold ; but there are also languages that are threefold or lack grammatical gender at all. The problem of gender also concerns the system of personal pronouns. We normally distinguish between three persons singular and three persons plural, but there are also some languages that have specific words for the dual. In the 3rd person singular we often have a distinction according to grammatical gender; in English, though, the choice is determined by natural gender; in Hungarian and Finnish we have no differentiation at all, in the Scandinavian languages on the other hand we have a differentiation that incorporate both grammatical and natural gender. In some languages the grammatical gender is also relevant in the 3rd pl..
Whereas traditionally we group languages according to historical language families, a more modern way is to look at grammatical features from a synchronic point of view. A certain number of common structural features would then characterize a sprachbund. For Europe, the most prominent sprachbund that we can determine is referred to as SAE or Charlemagne sprachbund. Haspelmath illustrates that German, Dutch, French, Occitan and Northern Italian are the most central members of this sprachbund. Important features are :
  1. the distinction between an indefinite and a definite article
  2. the formation of relative clauses, which are positioned after the noun concerned and are introduced by a variable relative pronoun
  3. a past tense construction with "to have"
  4. a passive voice construction that shows the object of the action in the syntactic position of the subject and that uses the past participle in connection with an auxiliary
  5. a specific suffix for the comparative

    Vocabulary

Latin, French and English not only served or still serve as linguae francae, but also influenced the vernacular/national languages due to their high prestige. Due to this prestige, there are not only "necessity loans", but also "luxury loans" and pseudo-loans. Many loans from these three languages can be considered internationalisms, although occasionally the meanings vary from one language to another, which might even lead to misunderstandings. Examples:
Three minor source languages for European borrowings are Arabic, Italian, German.
As far as the structuring or "wording" of the world is concerned changes occur relatively fast due to progress in knowledge, sociopolitical changes etc. Lexical items that seem more conservative are proverbs and metaphorical idioms. Many European proverbs and idioms go back to antiquity and the Bible; some originate in national stories and were spread over other languages via Latin. A typical European proverb to express that there is no profit without working can be paraphrased as "Roasted pigeons/larks/sparrows/geese/chickens/birds don't fly into one's mouth", e.g.:
In Geert Hofstede's terms Europe can, to a large extent, be considered an individualistic civilization ; in contrast, the Sinic, Japanese, Arabic and Hindu civilizations are collectivistic. We can further make Edward Hall's distinction between "low context" communication and "high context" communication. Most European nations use "low context" communication.

Some specific features of European communication strategies

Three linguae francae are prominent in European history:
Linguae francae that were less widespread, but still played a comparatively important role in European history are:
The first type of dictionary was the glossary, a more or less structured list of lexical pairs. The Latin-German Abrogans was among the first of these. A new wave of lexicography can be seen from the late 15th century onwards.

Language and identity, standardization processes

In the Middle Ages the two most important definitory elements of Europe were Christianitas and Latinitas. Thus language—at least the supranational language—played an elementary role. This changed with the spread of the national languages in official contexts and the rise of a national feeling. Among other things, this led to projects of standardizing national language and gave birth to a number of language academies. "Language" was then more connected with "nation" than with "civilization". "Language" was also used to create a feeling of "religious/ethnic identity".
Among the first standardization discussions and processes are the ones for Italian, French, English and German. But also a number of other nations began to look for and develop a standard variety in the 16th century.

Linguistic minorities

Despite the importance of English as an international lingua franca in Europe, Europe is also linguistically diverse, and minority languages are protected, e.g. by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages founded in the 1990s. This underlines that the popular view of "one nation = one language" is mostly false.
A minority language can be defined as a language used by a group that defines itself as an ethnic minority group, whereby the language of this group is typologically different and not a dialect of the standard language. For several years now, Jan Wirrer has been working on the status of minority languages in Europe, whereas others are in a rather weak position. Especially allochthonous minority languages are not given official status in the EU.
Some minor languages don't even have a standard yet, i.e. they have not even reached the level of an ausbausprache yet, which could be changed, e.g., if these languages were given official status..

Issues in language politics

France is the origin of two laws, or decrees, concerning language: the Ordonnance de Villers-Cotterêts, which says that every document in France should be written in French and the French Loi Toubon, which aims at eliminating Anglicisms from official documents. But a characteristic feature of Europe is linguistic diversity and tolerance, which is not only shown by the European Charta of Regional and Minority Languages. An illustrative proof of the promotion of linguistic diversity in the Middle Ages is the translation school in Toledo, Spain, founded in the 12th century.
This tolerant linguistic attitude is also the reason why the EU's general rule is that every official national language is also an official EU language. However, Letzebuergish/Luxemburgish is not an official EU language, because there are also other official languages with "EU status" in that country. Several concepts for an EU language policy are being debated: