Europe always struck me as a land full of languages.
Big ones like German and Italian.
Ones you may have never heard of like Friulian or Wymysorys.
Gazing over from the US, it looks like a linguistic playground.
Ask the experts though and you might get a different view: a grammatically flat, vanilla,
uniform Europe where the languages share common Euroversals.
It's the 1930's.
Benjamin Lee Whorf is struggling to understand how the Hopi talk about time.
(Wait, but Hopi's not a European language!
I know, we'll get there.)
Whorf is about to make a controversial breakthrough.
The Hopi don't have concepts for past, present and future, he says, because they speak Hopi.
We, on the other hand, do see time this way because we speak Standard Average European.
Even if you've never set foot in a linguistics class, you've likely heard part of this claim
before: the concepts in your mind are relative to the language you speak!
But I don't see many of you talking about the second part, the Standard Average European.
I'm here to change that.
So Whorf, let's say we met a Standard Average European.
What would they sound like?
Well, not like any single language.
They'd have common patterns that are definitively European.
Early attempts to listen for such patterns drew bold conclusions from just a handful
of languages.
German, French and English do it, so it must be European!
Now, depending on which expert you trusted, it started to seem like any language in Europe
both was and was not Standard Average European.
Everyone felt like there was some core heartland of shared Europeanness, but they couldn't
agree on specifics.
By the 90s, dissatisfied linguists were demanding a more rigorous approach.
If you can't find one, make one, so the European Science Foundation funded EUROTYP, a huge
project to collect data about the typology of over 130 European Languages.
Everything from word order to tenses and flow of time to the all-important adverbial subordinators.
These are words like "because", "if", "although".
The man responsible for collecting these little words used them to make general statements
called "Euroversals".
See, the field of typology was already hunting for Universals,
things true of every human language.
So here we have Euroversals about all European languages.
These make for some light bedtime reading, I promise.
Check out Euroversal #1 when you have the time.
The hunt for euroversals didn't stop at grammar.
Like in this more recent search for widespread idioms, where we discover that shedding crocodile
tears isn't unique to English.
At least 45 languages in Europe were found to fake their sobbing with
the same turn of phrase.
But all of these researchers admit we're still lacking important data.
What's wrong with our picture?
What are we still missing?
Well, it's one thing to read Euroversal #1, quite another when the author goes on to say
this could be a Universal.
It's one thing to find out that Europe cries crocodile tears, quite another when you learn
the same idiom appears in Swahili and Mongolian.
If we want to know what makes Europe unique, we need to compare non-European languages.
We got that comparison in 2001.
Finally, a serious look at features pervasive in Europe but uncommon around the world.
Was it all arcane, thorny grammatical nitpicks?
Actually, most of it is straightforward stuff.
Here, let's play a game called "you might be a European".
You might be a European if you have a word for both "the" and "a".
You might be a European if you use "have" as a helping verb, saying things like "have
done" and "have seen".
You might be a European if you use a little word like "than" in comparisons.
You might be a - yeah, sorry, that got old - but also if your word for "self" is different
from your reflexive pronoun.
If you're an English speaker these might sound normal enough to make you shrug.
Until you get to that last one, which works for German and Spanish but not English.
It's ok, it's ok.
I know nobody wants to hear their language is less European than German.
But what if it is?
Let's find out.
Let's count these features and score the languages against each other!
Tallying and mapping the 9 features that had complete data, we got a geography of euroversals.
It's a bold and cohesive unit: Germanic languages, Romance, Slavic, Baltic, Greek, Hungarian,
Albanian, all of them with five or more features.
Then it's a steep dropoff down to languages that have hardly any: Maltese in the South,
Basque and Celtic in the West, Turkish and Georgian in the East, Finnish and Estonian
in the North.
We have our boundaries.
But is there a core?
Well there is one area with a high concentration of nine features right here, centered around
France and Germany, dubbed the Charlemagne area.
Notice that English is a couple notches outside of that Charlemagne core, despite being a
close relative of one of the languages and a heavy borrower from another.
We've been calling this "Standard Average European", but it may not be so standard or
average on the world scene.
Instead of "default", it's actually been called downright exotic.
Well how did a continent end up sharing exotic features and then convincing us
these features were just plain normal?
The answer... would take up another video, and it's really a bunch of maybes.
Maybe we can blame the migrations and upheavals of the Middle Ages.
Perhaps the widespread use of Latin.
Maybe these languages have constantly been adjusting to one another.
But one thing's for sure.
The search for a genetic root, a shared ancestry behind all these features, won't cut it.
Europe's languages, it seems, aren't exotically Standard and Average because of what they've
inherited but because of what they've shared as they shaped the continent
into a unique language area.
Well, maybe except for you, Celtic and Basque.
Heh.
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