The Changing Languages of Europe

by Bernd Heine, Tania Kuteva

This book shows that the languages and dialects of Europe are becoming increasingly alike and furthermore that this unifying process goes back to Roman times, is accelerating, and affects every European language including those of different families such as Basque and Finnish. The unifying process involves every grammatical aspect of the languages and operates through changes so minute that native speakers fail to notice them. The authors reveal when, how, and why common grammatical structures have evolved and continue to evolve in processes of change that will transform the linguistic landscape of Europe.

Genres: Linguistics, Language

376 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even those with little training in linguistics have remarked that the languages of Europe show some striking similarities, such as the use of "have" plus a participle to form the perfect tense. In THE CHANGING LANGUAGES OF EUROPE Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva convincingly argue that these similarities are due not to coincidence or parallel development (= "drift"), but to a series of language contacts radiating outwards from various centres in Western Europe over the last two thousand years.

Two substantial introductory chapters open the book. In "Europe as a Linguistic Area" the authors describe previous research positing a European sprachbund, with certain languages lumped together in one theory and a different set in another. The second chapter is an introduction to the process of grammaticalization, showing how language contact-based innovations begin as small tendencies in an individual's speech (use patterns) that may eventually become integral features of the whole language.

There are four changes that have appeared in many European languages and, the authors argue, are due to language contact: the rise of articles, the rise of possessive perfects, the merging of comitative and instrumental forms, and the use of question words as relative pronouns in subordinate clauses. Using textual evidence, the authors show how these new features gradually spreading throughout European. Documentary evidence makes it very clear that the disappearance of the synthetic preterite and its replacement in this function by the analytic perfect began in Parisian French in the 12th century, had spread into Germany a century later, and then hit northern Italian dialects by the end of the sixteenth century. (The benefits manuscript evidence provide to students of language contact make me bemoan the short history of writing in the Uralic languages I study.)

Through their research, Heine and Kuteva have been able to postulate stages of grammaticalization, revealing that in some European languages things haven't progressed as much as others. Indeed, some languages haven't even started on the path at all. This helps better deliminate a possible European sprachbund, where suprisingly the Celtic languages and Russian are squarely outside the fold.

Heine and Kuteva are two of the leading scholars in grammaticalization theory, and each has amassed a hefty publishing record. Nonetheless, they have succeeded here in explaining the specifics of grammaticalization in European languages without using too heady specialist terminology. Even an undergraduate in linguistics could profit from this book. And for those linguists who deal all day with difficult specialist material, this is a downright *fun* monograph.

[André · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can hardly add anything to Christopher's excellent review on this book. It is really convincing that these parallel structures in the European languages are due to century-long language contact rather than shared retentions from the proto-language(s) or parallel developments. A notion I had some problems with, however, was the idea of "minor use patterns" being present in languages prior to the contact scenario, which then are turned into "major use patterns" through contact and grammaticalization processes. Maybe I missunderstood something, but this hypothesis seems to suggest that no new grammatical patterns could arise in a language if there hasn't been a minor and similar grammatical use for the element in question in the older stage of the language. That seems to be true for all cases discussed in the book, but doesn't strike me as a neccessary universal in contact-induced pattern replication. Gotta discuss this with my colleagues...
But nevertheless, this is a great book and will probably help me indeed seeing the big picture for my PhD thesis.