The Balkans The idea of areal convergence is commonly attributed to
Jernej Kopitar's description in 1830 of
Albanian,
Bulgarian and
Romanian as giving the impression of (), which has been rendered by
Victor Friedman as "one grammar with three lexicons".
Northeast Asia Some linguists, such as
Matthias Castrén,
G. J. Ramstedt,
Nicholas Poppe and
Pentti Aalto, supported the idea that the
Mongolic,
Turkic, and
Tungusic families of Asia (and some small parts of Europe) have a common ancestry, in a controversial group they call
Altaic.
Koreanic and
Japonic languages, which are also hypothetically related according to some scholars like
William George Aston, Shōsaburō Kanazawa,
Samuel Martin and
Sergei Starostin, are sometimes included as part of the purported Altaic family. This latter hypothesis was supported by people including
Roy Andrew Miller, John C. Street and
Karl Heinrich Menges.
Gerard Clauson,
Gerhard Doerfer,
Juha Janhunen,
Stefan Georg and others dispute or reject this. A common alternative explanation for similarities among the "Altaic" languages, such as
vowel harmony and
agglutination, is that they are due to areal diffusion. Whorf argued that these
languages were characterized by a number of similarities including
syntax and
grammar,
vocabulary and its use as well as the relationship between contrasting words and their origins, idioms and word order which all made them stand out from many other language groups around the world which do not share these similarities; in essence creating a continental . His point was to argue that the disproportionate degree of knowledge of SAE languages biased
linguists towards considering grammatical forms to be highly natural or even universal, when in fact they were only peculiar to the SAE
language group. Whorf likely considered
Romance and
West Germanic to form the core of the SAE, i.e. the
literary languages of
Europe which have seen substantial cultural influence from
Latin during the
medieval period. The
North Germanic and
Balto-Slavic languages tend to be more peripheral members.
Alexander Gode, who was instrumental in the development of
Interlingua, characterized it as "Standard Average European". The Romance,
Germanic, and
Slavic control languages of Interlingua are reflective of the language groups most often included in the SAE . The Standard Average European is most likely the result of ongoing
language contact in the time of the
Migration Period and later, continuing during the
Middle Ages and the
Renaissance. Inheritance of the SAE features from
Proto-Indo-European can be ruled out because Proto-Indo-European, as currently reconstructed, lacked most of the SAE features.
Others •
Sumerian and
Akkadian in the 3rd millennium BC •
Shimaore and
Kibushi on the Comorian island of
Mayotte • in the
Sepik River basin of
New Guinea • several
linguistic areas of the Americas, including: •
Mesoamerican linguistic area • East
Anatolia—proposed, though currently uncertain • Modern
Himalayas region ==Proposed examples==