Phonological areas in Eurasia

Abstract

This thesis investigates the phonological areas of Eurasia. A phonological area is a geograph­ical area where different lects (linguistic varieties) have converged into similar phonological patterns. In order to compute the distribution of phonological areas in Eurasia, I have built Phonotacticon 1.0, a cross-linguistic database that contains basic phonotactic information of more than 500 Eurasian lects. It includes the segmental phonemic inventory, tonemes, and on­set/nucleus/coda sequences of each sample lect. I employ this database to measure the phono­logical distance between Eurasian lects and clustering them to detect areal patterns within Eurasia. The phonological convergence patterns generated thereby largely overlap with the previously hypothesized linguistic areas, namely Europe, South Asia, Qinghai-Gansu, Northeast Asia, and Mainland Southeast Asia. This dissertation thus presents a novel method to measure the similarity between two phonological structures and use that method to confirm the linguistic areas previously argued for.