[Lingtyp] Reporting cross-linguistic frequencies

[Omri Amiraz]

Dear all,
I agree with Ian that, in addition to genealogical and areal biases, the very question of what counts as a language versus a dialect is partly subjective. This makes actual frequencies even more problematic, since we would obtain different results depending on whether we treat Wu Chinese as one language or as thirty separate languages, as Ian pointed out.
Juergen wrote: "We can empirically assess the extent to which the probability of a random language having a certain property depends on (or is influenced by, or varies with, etc.) it being related to certain other languages, or being  spoken (or signed) in a particular area."

I wonder whether it might be useful to have a measure of the genealogical and areal spread of a feature, essentially quantifying how broadly it is distributed across families and regions in the present-day world. Such a measure might be more straightforward to interpret than an adjusted frequency/probability, since it is not clear whether the described population is a hypothetical set of isolated isolates or something else.

Is anyone aware of an existing metric that captures genealogical or areal spread in this way?

Best,
Omri
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20251120/ba35d5e1/attachment.htm>