LING 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Sprachbund, Wakashan Languages, Halkomelem
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Lecture 27: when linguistics first started doing historical analyses of the languages of bc, many of them believed that the salish and wakashan languages were historically connected. Why else would the languages have so many similarities: however, after some years of debate, most linguistic today do not think wakashan and. The answer is: because they have had many centuries of social interaction between the two families, the languages have influenced each other. They have grown more similar over time: this may seem surprising, but languages influencing each other is a well-known phenomenon. It"s so common, linguists have a special term for a group of languages that are not all historically related, but that become similar due to contact. They call a group of languages like that a sprachbund: the northwest area of bc is actually famous (among historical linguists) as a big.
