Linguistic Maps

Aspirated plosives

Aspirations occurs in English in initial onsets like in ‘pat’ [pʰæt], ‘tack’ [’tʰæk] or ‘cat’ [’kʰæt]. It is not phonemic, since it doesn’t distinguish meanings, but it’s distinctive in Mandarin e.g.  皮 [pʰi] (skin) vs. 比 [pi] (proportion). 

Non-phonemic aspiration occurs in: Tamazight, English, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Kurdish, Persian, Uyghur. 

Glottal Stop

Languages that have a phonemic glottal stop /ʔ/ - about 40% of all human languages. This is a very widespread consonant except in Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Turkic, Uralic, Mongolic, Dravidian, Koreanic and Japonic languages.

Tenseless languages

Language that do not possess the grammatical category of “tense”, although obviously, they can communicate about past or future situations, but they do it resorting to adverbs (earlier, yesterday, tomorrow), the context (pragmatics), but mostly aspect markers, that show how a situation relates to the timeline (perfective, continuous, etc.) or modal markers (obligation, need, orders, hipothesis, etc.)

Prefixing and suffixing languages

Mostly prefixing - Most Berber languages, Bantu languages, Guarani, many Macro-Ge languages, Mayan languages, Oto-Manguean, Mixtec, Siouan, Navajo and many Na-Dene languages, some languages in northwest Papua and northwest Australia. 

Mostly suffixing - Indo-European, most Afro-Asiatic, Turkic, Mongolic, Dravidian, Austronesian, Northeast Caucasian, Eskimo-Aleut, Uralic, Koreanic-Japonic, most Pama-Nyungan languages.

Equally prefixing and suffixing - Cree, Ojibwe, O’odham, Tarahumara, Pilagá, Carib, Central Atlas Tamazight, Tuareg, Iraqi Arabic, Zande, Krio languages, Ewe, Toba, many languages in east Papua-New-Guinea, Basque, Nortwest Caucasian, Celtic. 

Little affixation - typical of isolating languages, in Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, Hmong-Mien, Nilo-Saharan, Mande, languages of West Africa, many Austronesian languages. 

Pronounciation of the digraph <OU> 

[ow] - Spanish (very rarely), Northern European Portuguese and formal register of Brazilian Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, Romanian, Czech, Slovak, Finnish, Karelian, Estonian, Sami languages.

[o] - Portuguese (European, and informal Brazilian)

[ɔw] - Somali, Occitan, Catalan and Flemish.

[əw] - Afrikaans, Europen Portuguese (Oporto city region).

[aw] - Dutch.

[u] - French (also for /w/), Breton, Cornish, and Greek, shown here for comparison althoug it is more precisely <ου> (o+ipsilon). 

[aʊ, ʌ, oʊ/əʊ, ʊ, u:] - English as in <out>, <trouble>, <soul>, <could> and <group>, respectively. 

Relativization strategies

How do languages form relative clauses like “the man that ate bread went home”.

Relative pronoun/particle/complementizer - “the man [that/who ate bread] went home”. Typical of Indo-European, Uralic and Semitic languages. 

Correlative relative (non-reduction) - “the man [who ate bread], [that man] went home or "the man [he ate bread] went home” - this strategy involves an anaphor, repeating the antecedent with a noun/pronoun. Pronoun retention is also lumped in here. This strategy occurs in Indo-Aryan languages (Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, etc.), in Mande languages (e.g Bambara in Mali), Yoruba, Lakhota, Warao, Xerente, Walpiri, etc. 

Nominalized/participial relative - “the [bread eating] man went home" or "the [bread eaten] man went home" - I lumped this two together because the behaviour is very similar - used in Turkic, Mongolic, Koreanic, Dravidian, and Bantu languages. 

Genitive relative - “[ate bread]'s man went home" - used in Sino-Tibetan, Khmer, Tagalog, Minangkabau, and Aymara. 

Relative affix - “the man [ate-REL bread] went home” - used in Seri, Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages and Maale (Omotic). 

Adjunction - “the man [ate bread] went home”, with no overt marker just justapositions modifying the main clause. Used in Japanese, Thai, Shan, Lao, Malagasy. 

Internally headed relative - "[the man ate the bread] went home", the nucleous is in the relative clause itself. Used in Navajo, Apache, Haida. 

Nonconcatenative morphology

Nonconcatenative morphology, also called discontinuous morphology and introflection, is a form of word formation in which the root is modified and which does not involve stringing morphemes together sequentially.

It may involve apophony (ablaut), transfixation (vowel templates inserted into consonantal roots), reduplication, tone/stress changes, or truncation. 

It is very developed in Semitic, Berber, and Chadic branches of Afro-Asiatic. It also occurs extensively among other language families: Nilo-Saharan, Northeast Caucasian, Na-Dene, Salishan and the isolate Seri (in Mexico).

(near) Open/low front unrounded vowel

This is the vowel used in English “sad”.  It exists as an allophone of other vowels in Turkish, Russian, Dutch, Slovak, Swedish and French (as a nasal vowel). 

Light verb constructions

A light verb is a verb deprived of its basic meaning. Many languages employ them in extensive constructions of verb+noun, instead of forming new verbs. 

In English, the verb “make” can be a light verb, as in “make the bed”. It doesn’t mean that you are going to literally “build a bed”. But in many languages these constructions are the norm for new verbs that enter the language and are extremely common. 

In many languages, like Basque, Persian, Hindi, or Japanese, instead of “to clean” one can have “do cleaning”, or instead of “to speak”, “to make talk”, or instead of “to hug”, “to give hug”. 

A light verb is in the midway between a full lexical verb and an auxialiry verb. In English a few verbs can function as light verbs (do, make, give, take, have) but these constructions are not the norm. 

Languages where 3rd person singular pronouns are the same or derived from demonstrative determiners 

For example, “o” in Turkish is both “he/she/it” and “that”. 

Double object construction

Some languages, instead of a dative construction (He gave the meat to the dog), exhibit a double object construction, like English: He gave the dog the meat. In this case there is no marker to indicate the indirect object, just the justaposition of both the direct and indirect objects, without any case marking. Both objects are treated as the same. This contrasts with a dative or indirect object construction, and with a secondary-object marking.

Comparative constructions

Ex: "My father is older than my mother".

Types: 1. Locative comparatives: "From my mother, my father is old" - a movement pre/postposition or case like "from, to, at, on, for" (includes genitive constructions).  2. Exceed comparatives: "My father old exceed my mother" - a verb meaning "to exceed" or "to surpass".  3. Conjoined comparative: "My father old, my mother young" - two clauses, with antonyms or a negation of the opposite, or just justaposition of the terms.  4. Particle comparative: "My father is older than my mother" - particle "than" with or without a marker on the adjective.

Some languages use a mixed strategy, like Russian, Romanian, Portuguese or Italian. Only the most used strategy is shown in some cases. 

Languages that use “ciao” or a similar version descended from Italian as a greeting or an informal goobye

Present in: Portuguese (tchau), Spanish from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Costa Rica, Catalan, Sicilian, Maltese, Venetian, Lombard, Romansh, German (tschau), Swiss German, every Slavic language except Polish and Belarussian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian (tsau), Greek, Albanian (qao), Romanian (ceau), Hungarian (csaó), Somali, Amharic, Tigrinya, Malaysian. The Vietnamese “chào” is not related to Italian, so it’s unmarked there.