Standard Average European


Standard Average European is a concept originally introduced in 1936 by American linguist Benjamin Whorf to group the modern Indo-European languages of Europe with shared common features. Whorf argued that the SAE languages were characterized by a number of similarities, including syntax and grammar, vocabulary and its use, as well as the relationship between contrasting words and their origins, idioms, and word order, which all made them stand out from many other language groups around the world which do not share these similarities, in essence creating a continental sprachbund. His intention was to argue that the disproportionate amount of SAE-specific knowledge in linguistics created a substantial SAE-centric bias, leading to generalization errors, such as mistaking linguistic features idiosyncratic to the SAE language group for universal tendencies.
Whorf contrasted what he called the SAE tense system with that of the Hopi language of North America, which Whorf analyzed as being based on a distinction not of tense, but on things that have in fact occurred compared to things that have as ''yet not occurred'', but which may or may not occur in the future. The accuracy of Whorf's analysis of Hopi tense later became a point of controversy in linguistics.

Overview

Whorf likely considered Romance and West Germanic to form the core of the SAE, i.e. the literary languages of Europe which have seen substantial cultural influence from Latin during the medieval period. The North Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages tend to be more peripheral members.
Alexander Gode, who was instrumental in the development of Interlingua, characterized it as "Standard Average European". The Romance, Germanic, and Slavic control languages of Interlingua are reflective of the language groups most often included in the SAE Sprachbund.

As a ''Sprachbund''

According to, the SAE languages form a Sprachbund characterized by the following features, sometimes called "euroversals" by analogy with linguistic universals:
  • definite and indefinite articles
  • postnominal relative clauses with inflected relative pronouns that signal the role of the head in the clause
  • a periphrastic perfect formed with 'have' plus a passive participle ;
  • a preponderance of generalizing predicates to encode experiencers, i.e. experiencers appear as surface subjects in nominative case
  • a passive construction formed with a passive participle plus an intransitive copula-like verb ;
  • a prominence of anticausative verbs in inchoative-causative pairs
  • dative external possessors, Portuguese Ela lavou-lhe o cabelo "She washed his hair"
  • negative indefinite pronouns without verbal negation
  • particle comparatives in comparisons of inequality
  • equative constructions based on adverbial relative-clause structures, e.g. Occitan tan grand coma un elefant, Russian tak že X kak Y, where coma/kak are "adverbial relative pronouns" according to Haspelmath
  • subject person affixes as strict agreement markers, i.e. the verb is inflected for person and number of the subject, but subject pronouns may not be dropped even when this would be unambiguous
  • differentiation between intensifiers and reflexive pronouns
Besides these features, which are uncommon outside Europe and thus useful for defining the SAE area, Haspelmath lists further features characteristic of European languages :
The Sprachbund defined this way consists of the following languages:
The Balkan sprachbund is thus included as a subset of the larger SAE, while Baltic Eastern Europe is a coordinate member.
Not all the languages listed above show all the listed features, so membership in SAE can be described as gradient. Based on nine of the above-mentioned common features, Haspelmath regards French and German as forming the nucleus of the Sprachbund, surrounded by a core formed by English, the other Romance languages, the Nordic languages, and the Western and Southern Slavic languages. Hungarian, the Baltic languages, the Eastern Slavic languages, and the Finnic languages form more peripheral groups. All languages identified by Haspelmath as core SAE are Indo-European languages, except Hungarian and the Finnic languages. However, not all Indo-European languages are SAE languages: the Celtic, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian languages remain outside the SAE Sprachbund.
The Standard Average European Sprachbund is most likely the result of ongoing language contact beginning in the time of the Migration Period. Inheritance of the SAE features from Proto-Indo-European can be ruled out because Proto-Indo-European, as currently reconstructed, lacked most of the SAE features. Furthermore, in some cases younger forms of a language do have an SAE feature which attested older forms lack; for example, Latin does not have a periphrastic perfect, but modern Romance languages such as Spanish and French do. Much of the area of SAE was at various times part of the Roman Empire or the vague concept of a political entity called Christendom and thus affected by the religious, political and ideological discourse of these entities and their respective sphere of influence. This discourse and long distance communication among elites generally took place in one of the linguas francas of the era – Koine Greek and Classical Latin in Late Antiquity, Medieval Latin in the Middle Ages and finally in the modern era Modern Latin gradually being replaced by vernaculars such as modern French, German and – in the 20th and 21st century – increasingly English. These languages have left learned borrowings in the prestige variants of almost all European languages and continue to provide loanwords, calques and idioms.