Episode 10: Standard Average European

Join Rowan and Matt as they discuss the Standard Average European sprachbund (SAE). This is a language area that is centered mostly on Western European Romance and Germanic languages (think, French and German), but some features of it extend much farther into the Caucasus Mountains, etc.

Haspelmath's formulation of the sprachbund can be found in this paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247869081_The_European_linguistic_area_Standard_Average_European

A summary of that paper, intended for conlangers: http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/sae.html

Wikipedia for the overlapping (or subset, depending on definition) Balkan Sprachbund: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund

WALS chapter on Haspelmath's feature 12, intensive vs. reflexive pronouns: https://wals.info/chapter/47

WALS chapter on comparative constructions: https://wals.info/chapter/121

Paper on equative constructions: https://zenodo.org/record/814964/files/EquativeConstructions_2016b.pdf?download=1