[Lingtyp] Reporting cross-linguistic frequencies

[randylapolla]

Dear Omri,

> 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.

There is a whole field of geolinguistics, most developed in Japan due to the efforts of Hashimoto Mantaro back in the 1980’s, which has been carried on by his colleagues, students (in particular Endo Mitsuaki), and their students. Their publications, such as Studies in Geolinguistics and Studies in Asian Geolinguistics, are generally free, and show the distribution of features either within the boundaries of a language or across wide areas independent of language family.They also have regular conferences.

Randy

> On 20 Nov 2025, at 4:36 PM, Omri Amiraz via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
>
> 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
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