Eurolinguistics is a neologistic term for the study of the languages of Europe. The term Eurolinguistics was first used by Norbert Reiter in 1991 (German equivalent: Eurolinguistik). Apart from a series of works dealing with only a part of the European languages, the work of Harald Haarmann pursues a "pan- or trans-European perspective". This goal is also pursued by Mario Wandruszka.
Typological questions have mainly been dealt with by the Eurolinguistischer Arbeitskreis Mannheim (ELAMA; led by Per Sture Ureland) and the EUROTYP projects. Important sources of linguistic data for Eurolinguistic studies are the Atlas Linguarum Europae (for vocabulary studies) and the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005, for grammar studies).
The internet platform EuroLinguistiX (ELiX) (edited by Joachim Grzega) offers a bibliography of Eurolinguistic publications as well as a wiki, a discussion forum, an academic internet journal in order to address also aspects of "linguistic and cultural history", "sociology of languages", "language politics" and "intercultural communication". In 2006, Joachim Grzega published a basic reader on common features of European languages.
Also joint with the ELAMA, the EuroLSJ project by Erhard Steller tries to collect essential results of Eurolinguistics and make them usable for everyday life in Europe by transforming them into a representative standard language (LSJ European / Europé LSJ) which wants to serve as an optimized "acquisition and memory helper" (Giuseppe G. Castorina) for a quicker and easier access to all languages of Europe.
Common features of European languages
Writing systems (Sources and further information for this section: Haarmann 1991, Grzega 2006)
Writing was introduced to Europe by the Greeks, and from there also brought to the Romans (6th century BC). There are four alphabets in regular use in the areas generally considered Europe. The Latin alphabet was developed into several scripts. In the early years of Europe, the Carolingian minuscules were the most important variety of the Latin script. From this two branches developed, the Gothic/Fracture/German tradition, which Germans used well into the 20th century, and the Italian/Italic/Antiqua/Latin tradition, still used. For some nations the integration into Europe meant giving up older scripts, e.g. the Germanic gave up the runes (Futhark) (3rd to 17th centuries), the Irish the Ogham script (4th to 7th centuries). The Cyrillic script is the second most widespread alphabet in Europe, and was developed in the 9th century under the influence of the Greek, Latin and Glagolitic alphabets. Both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are used for multiple languages in multiple states, both inside and outside Europe. As well as these two, there are two alphabets used primarily for a single language, although they are occasionally applied to minority languages in the states from which they originate. The oldest of these alphabets is the Greek alphabet, which could be considered the progenitor of all the surviving alphabets of Europe, with the earliest recorded inscriptions appearing in the 9th century BC. The other is found in the Caucasus, originating in the 5th century. The Georgian alphabet is used primarily to write Georgian, though it is also used to write the other Kartvelian languages, Svan, Mingrelian and Laz, all of which are found largely within the borders of Georgia.
Sound features (Sources and further information for this section: Haarmann 1973, Asher 1994, Price 1998, Grzega 2006)
The sound systems of languages may differ considerably between languages. European languages can thus rather be characterized negatively, e.g. by the absence of click sounds. One could also think of specific prosodic features, such as tonal accents. But there are also tonal languages in Europe: Serbo-Croatian (e.g. lètī ‘he flies, is flying’ with long rising accent vs. lêta ‘years’ with long falling accent) and Slovene (e.g. sûda ‘of the vessel’ with long falling accent vs. súda ‘of the court’ with long rising accent). In Slovene, the use of the musical accent is declining (cf. Rehder 1998: 234) but there are hardly any contexts where intelligibility is endangered. In Sweden Swedish (but not in Finland Swedish) there also is a pitch accent in some words, which can be meaningful, e.g. ´anden ‘the duck’ vs. ˇanden ‘the ghost, spirit’.
Grammatical features (Sources and further information for this section: Asher 1994, Price 1998, Haspelmath 2001, Heine/Kuteva 2006)
As a general introductory remark, a distinction can be made between three structural types of languages: isolating (i.e. grammatical/sentence functions are expressed through analytic means and relatively strict word-order rules, e.g. the strict S-V order rule in English), agglutinating (i.e. grammatical/sentence functions are expressed through affixes, with one affix expressing exactly one function) and inflecting (i.e. grammatical/sentence functions are expressed through affixes, with one affix expressing several functions). European languages are seldom pure representatives of one type. For (a) Modern English is a good example (and in many ways the code oral of French verbs); for (c) Old English and Modern High German are good examples (and in many ways the code écrit of French verb forms); classical representatives of type (b) are Finnish and Hungarian. If a language is not isolating, this does not necessarily mean that it has no word-order rules. Latin, Basque, Finnish and the Slavic languages have a relatively free word order, whereas many languages show more restricted rules. German and Dutch, e.g., show verb-second word-order in main clauses and verb-final order in subordinate clauses. English has subject-verb word-order, which is also preferred by the Romanic languages. Irish and Scottish Gaelic have a basic verb-initial word order.
A distinction can also be made between analytic constructions (with free grammatical morphemes, i.e. grammatical elements as separate words) and synthetic constructions (with bound grammatical morphemes, i.e. grammatical elements attached to or included in a word), e.g. the house of the man vs. the mans house.
Apart from the points already mentioned, the categories of aspect (not always easy to separate from the tense system) and gender are noteworthy. Under the category of aspect linguists basically understand the distinction between perfective actions (activity finished, has led to a result; single event) and imperfective actions (activity not yet finished, w/out information on termination; long duration, repetitive). The Slavic languages have a fine and rigid aspect system; in English there's the distinction between progressive and non-progressive (simple) and a distinction between present perfect and past; in the Romanic languages the imperfect serves to denote background actions.
The most current gender systems in Europe are twofold (masculine vs. feminine, e.g. in the Romanic languages, or uter vs. neuter, e.g. in Swedish and Danish); but there are also languages that are threefold (e.g. Slavic, German) or lack grammatical gender at all (e.g. English, Hungarian, Finnish). The problem of gender also concerns the system of personal pronouns.
Whereas languages are traditionally grouped according to linguistic genealogy, a more modern way is to look at grammatical features from a synchronic point of view. A certain number of common structural features would then characterize a sprachbund. For Europe, one of the most prominent proposed sprachbunds is referred to as Standard Average European (SAE) or the Charlemagne sprachbund. Haspelmath (2001) illustrates that German, Dutch, French, Occitan and Northern Italian are the most central members of this sprachbund. Important features are (cf., e.g., Haspelmath 2001, Heine/Kuteva 2006): the distinction between an indefinite and a definite article the formation of relative clauses, which are positioned after the (pro)noun concerned and are introduced by a variable relative pronoun a past tense construction with "to have" a passive voice construction that shows the object of the action in the syntactic position of the subject and that uses the past participle in connection with an auxiliary a specific suffix for the comparative
Vocabulary (Sources and further information for this section: Haarmann 1975, Haarmann 1993, Paczolay 1997, Panzer 2000, Görlach 2002)
Latin, French and English not only served or still serve as linguae francae (cf. below), but also influenced the vernacular/national languages due to their high prestige. Due to this prestige, there are not only "necessity loans", but also "luxury loans" and pseudo-loans. Many loans from these three languages (esp. Neo-Latin with its Greek elements) can be considered internationalisms, although occasionally the meanings vary from one language to another, which might even lead to misunderstandings. Examples: Lat. forma: e.g. Fr. forme, It. Sp. Cat. Cz. Slovak. Serbo-Croat. Slovene Maltese Hung. Pol. Latv. Lith. forma, Dan. Swed. E. Du. vorm (shape) and form (aerobic endurance), Romansh furma, G. Form, Ir. foirm Fr. restaurant, e.g. E. Du. Norw. Cat. Romansh restaurant, G. Restaurant, Swed. restaurang, Pg. restaurante, Sp. restaurante, It. ristorante, Cz. restaurace, Slovak reštaurácia, Slovene restavracija, Latv. restorâns, Lith. restoranas, Estn. restoran, Pol. restauracja, Serbian restoran, Maltese ristorant/restorant E. manager, e.g. Du. Norw. Swed. Icel. Fr. Sp. Cat. It. Romansh manager, G. Manager, Finn. manageri, Pol. menadżer, Serbo-Croat. menadžer, Lith. menedžeris, Hung. menedzser, Maltese maniġer
Three minor source languages for European borrowings are Arabic (esp. in mathematics and science, foreign plants and fruits), Italian (esp. in arts, esp. from the 15th to the 17th centuries), and German (esp. in arts, education, mining, trading from the 12th to the 20th centuries with varying importance).
As far as the structuring or "wording" of the world is concerned changes occur relatively fast due to progress in knowledge, sociopolitical changes etc. Lexical items that seem more conservative are proverbs and metaphorical idioms. Many European proverbs and idioms go back to antiquity and the Bible; some originate in national stories and were spread over other languages via Latin. A typical European proverb to express that there is no profit without working can be paraphrased as "Roasted pigeons/larks/sparrows/geese/chickens/birds don't fly into one's mouth", e.g.:
Bavarian: Gibroutna Taubn fliagn oan et ins Maul (pigeon) Czech: Pečení holubi nelétají do huby (pigeons) Danish: Stegte duer flyve ingen i munden (pigeon) Dutch: De gebraden duiven vliegen je niet in de mond (pigeons) English: He thinks that larks will fall into his mouth roasted Finnish: Ei paistetut varpuset suuhun lennä (sparrows) French: Les alouettes ne vous tombent pas toutes rôties dans le bec (larks) Standard German: Gebratene Tauben fliegen einem nicht ins Maul (pigeon) Hungarian: Senkinek nem repül a szájába a sült galamb (pigeon) Latvian: Cepts zvirbulis no jumta mutē nekrīt (sparrow) Lithuanian: Keptas karvelis neatlėks pats i burną (pigeon) Norwegian (Nynorsk): Det kjem ikkje steikte fuglar fljugande i munnen (birds) Polish: Pieczone gołąbki nie przyjdą same do gąbki (pigeons) Serbo-Croatian: Pečeni golubovi ne lete u usta (pigeons) Slovak: Nech nik nečaká, že mu pečené holuby budú padať do úst (pigeons) Slovene: Pečeni golobje ne lete nobenemu v usta (pigeons) Swedish: Stekta sparvar flyger inte in i munnen (sparrows)
Communicative strategies (Sources and further information for this section: Axtell 1993, Collett 1993, Morrison et al. 1994, Hickey/Stewart 2005, Grzega 2006)