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. 

Phonemic aspiration: Sami languages, Icelandic, Faroese, Danish, Mongol, Kalmyk, Georgian, Armenian, North Caucasian languages, Sino-Tibetan languages, Hmong-Mien languages, Austroasiatic languages, Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Odya, Bengali, Nepali, Tai-Kadai languages, Nivkh, many Bantu languages (Swahili, Xhosa, Zulu, Venda, Tswana, Sesotho, Macua, Chichewa, and many Amerindian languages (Na-Dene, Siouan, Algic, Tshimshianic, Shastan, Mayan, Uto-Aztecan, Mixtec, Oto-Manguean, Quechua, Ayamara, Pilagá, Toba, etc.)

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.

It’s almost universally present in the indigenous languages of the Americas, in Afro-Asiatic languages, in Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages, in Papuan languages, North Caucasian langauges, and in some Khoe, Sino-Tibetan, Daic, Uralic, Iranian, Turkic and Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages. It’s also present in Estuary and Scouse English as in ‘watter’ as /woːʔɐ/. 

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.)

Tenseless languages are mostly analytic/isolating, but some are not. They occur mainly in East and Southeast Asia (Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Kra-Dai, Hmong-Mien), Oceania, Dyirbal (in NE Australia), Malagasy, Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Ewe, Fon and many Mande languages of Western Africa, most creole languages, Guarani, Mayan languages, Hopi, some Uto-Aztecan languages, and Greenlandic and other Inuit dialects. 

Prefixing and suffixing languages

Based off and simplified from: https://wals.info/feature/26A#2/22.6/153.1 

Pronounciation of the digraph <OU> 

Maybe I missed a few languages that use <ou>; if you know any more, point them out, please. 

Relativization strategies

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

If you know about the languages left in blank, please let me know!

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).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonconcatenative_morphology 

(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). 

Phonemically, it exists in English, all Arabic languages/dialects, all Berber languages, Somali, Afrikaans, Norwegian, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Danish, Kurdish, Azeri, Persian, Qazaq, Uzbek, Turkmen, Uyghur, Bashkir, Orya, Sinhalese, and in some dialects of Portuguese, Andalusian Spanish, Greek, Romanian. 

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. 

If you know more languages that use these constructions frequently (I’m not sure about Turkic languages), please inform me.

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”. 

Source: https://wals.info/feature/43A#3/32.99/28.92 

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.

English, of course, behaves in a mixed way, allowing for either dative or double object constructions. In the map, all languages with either mixed or only double object constructions are marked. 

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. 

Source: https://wals.info/chapter/121 

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. 

Edit: the map only includes those languages that use ‘ciao’ as the most common informal way of greeting/goodbye, not as part of slang, argots or people who use it just to sound cool. For example, in Portuguese, Maltese or Latvian it has surpassed the older forms of saying goodbye in informal situations for all social classes.