[Lingtyp] language typology, linguistic typology, comparative linguistics

[Martin Haspelmath]

Dear all,

What is the name of our subfield (or subcommunity):

"language typology"?
"linguistic typology"?
or maybe simply "comparative linguistics"?

Linguists know that there is no difference between the first two, and 
they also understand the shorter "typology", but this term is opaque for 
nonlinguists, and the duality of "language typology"  and "linguistic 
typology" is inconvenient, because there is incomplete aggregation on 
sites like Google Scholar and Academia.edu.

(It seems that on Academia.edu, 6354 people are followers of "language 
typology", 8732 follow "linguistic typology", and 7090 follow 
"typology", though perhaps not all of the latter mean typology in the 
linguistics sense.)

Historically, it seems clear that "language typology" is the older term, 
and has become current in the 1970s. Since the 1990s, it got a 
competitor ("linguistic typology"), for unclear reasons.

(More on the history of these two terms can be found in the following 
blogpost: https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1022)

So I'm wondering: Maybe we should consider switching to an entirely 
different, fully transparent term, namely "comparative linguistics"?

It seems that there are quite a few well-established fields with 
"comparative" in their names: comparative economics, comparative 
education, comparative law, comparative literature, comparative 
mythology, comparative psychology, and "comparative zoology" even has a 
famous museum on the Harvard campus.

(So far, at least one department of comparative linguistics in the 
relevant sense exists: at the University of Zurich, 
http://www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/en.html).

I feel that the term "comparative linguistics" for what used to be 
called "language/linguistic typology" has another big advantage: The 
term fails to signal association with a particular subcommunity -- and 
this is good. After all, many comparative linguists work in a generative 
framework, and these do not usually associate with the term "typology". 
However, much of what they do is clearly "typological" in the usually 
understood sense, so it is really odd to exclude this community 
terminologically.

In any event, the question of the name of our subfield of linguistics 
seems not gto have been discussed explicitly. Maybe it would not be a 
complete waste of time to engage in some discussion.

Martin

-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10	
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
IPF 141199
Nikolaistrasse 6-10
D-04109 Leipzig





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