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A sprachbund (pronounced /ˈʃpraːxˌbʊnt/ plural sprachbünde /ˈʃpraːxˌbʏndə/), from the German word for "language union", also known as a linguistic area, convergence area, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity. They may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related. Where genetic affiliations are unclear, the sprachbund characteristics might give a false appearance of relatedness.

One clear example instance is the East Asian Sprachbund, in which many languages of South-East Asia, including Thai and Vietnamese, have taken on the appearance of neighbouring languages like Chinese, with monosyllabic words and distinctive tones. Yet Thai and Vietnamese are no longer believed to be related to the Sino-Tibetan family or even to each other.

In Europe, the so-called Balkan Linguistic Union is a sprachbund comprised of Albanian, Romanian, the South Slavic languages of the southern Balkan (Bulgarian with Macedonian and to a lesser degree Serbian and Croatian), Greek, and Romani. All these are Indo-European languages but from very different branches. Yet they have exhibited several signs of grammatical convergence, such as avoidance of the infinitive, future tense formation, and others. The same features are not found in other languages that are otherwise closely related, such as the other Romance and Slavic languages. According to the first researcher of the Balkan Linguistic Union, K. Sandfeld, ^[1], most of the linguistic innovations shared by the members of the Balkan Sprachbund originate from Greek during the time of Byzantine predominance in the Balkans. However, this view is not universally accepted.

Likewise, the Romance and Germanic languages of Western Europe (other than English) share many features due to interaction. Similarly there are also features common to languages situated in Europe that are not found in Indo-European languages spoken in India and Iran, but are found in the Uralic languages. This is because of the great migrations across Europe.

Many linguists think the Mongolian, Turkic, and Manchu-Tungus families of northern Asia are genetically related, in a group they call Altaic, but the evidence is equivocal, and their common features such as vowel harmony might instead mean they are part of a sprachbund.

Other sprachbünde can be found:

• in the Ethiopian highlands
• in the Sepik River basin of New Guinea
• in South Asia (i.e. the Indian subcontinent)
• in the Baltics (northeast Europe)
• in the Caucasus
• covering the Australian continent (prior to European settlement)
• throughout the Americas (e.g. the Pacific Northwest Coast and the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area).
  • (see Native American languages#Linguistic areas)

Areal features are common features of a group of languages in a Sprachbund.

In contrast, a sprachraum (from German, "language area"), also known as a dialect continuum, describes a group of genetically related dialects spoken across a geographical area, differing in their genetic relationship only slightly between areas that are geographically close, and gradually decreasing in mutual intelligibility as distances increase.

• Language convergence
• Language merger

• Campbell, Lyle. (In press). Areal linguistics. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (2nd ed.). Oxford: Elsevier. (Online version: http://www.linguistics.utah.edu/Faculty/campbell/CampbellArealLingEnc.doc).