The European language area

A. Even Western Europe is a language area, although when we speak a European language and are most exposed to others, it is easy to suppose that European features are simply “normal.”

B. Articles. For example, as normal as it seems to us for a language to have words for a and the, in fact, only about one in five of the world’s languages do, with many having neither (such as the ones in the Sinosphere). Proto-Indo-European did not have words for a and the. Instead, these words developed in a great many of its children and ones of different subfamilies spoken in the same region. In addition, even

Hungarian has a and the, despite being of a different family altogether, Uralic, which elsewhere tends not to have articles. The prevalence of this feature in Western Europe is due to grammar sharing over time, between subfamilies and even families of language.

C. Another example is the perfect construction with have. To express the perfect with have in a sentence such as I have sewn this dress is almost exclusively found in Europe. Again, this was not a feature of Proto-Indo-European, yet as rare as it is in languages of the world, it has developed again and again in various of its descendants.

D. These are a few of many ways in which European languages are similar, even though Proto-Indo-European lacked the feature and the feature often appears in languages outside of Indo-European, including Finnish, Hungarian, or Basque.