Standard Average European

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Standard Average European (SAE) is a concept introduced in 1939 by American linguist

Whorf contrasted what he called the SAE tense system (which contrasts past, present and future tenses) with that of the Hopi language of North America, which Whorf analyzed as being based on a distinction not of tense, but on things that have in fact occurred (a realis mood encompassing SAE past and present) compared to things that have as yet not occurred, but which may or may not occur in the future (irrealis mood). The accuracy of Whorf's analysis of Hopi tense later became a point of controversy in linguistics.

Overview

Whorf likely considered Romance and West Germanic to form the core of the SAE, i.e. the literary languages of Europe which have seen substantial cultural influence from Latin during the medieval period. The North Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages tend to be more peripheral members.

Alexander Gode, who was instrumental in the development of Interlingua, characterized it as "Standard Average European".^[2] The Romance, Germanic, and Slavic control languages of Interlingua are reflective of the language groups most often included in the SAE Sprachbund.

However, out of all the languages of Europe, only French and German have all the criteria that constitute "Standard Average European", i.e. these two are the "most European" languages. Incidentally, France and West Germany were also both founding members of the European Union and its predecessors and their languages are so-called "working languages of the EU" (besides English)

As a Sprachbund

According to Haspelmath (2001), the SAE languages form a Sprachbund characterized by the following features, sometimes called "euroversals" by analogy with linguistic universals:^[3]

• definite and indefinite articles (e.g. English the vs. a/an)
• postnominal relative clauses with inflected relative pronouns that signal the role of the head in the clause (e.g. English who vs. whose)
• a
  periphrastic
  perfect formed with 'have' plus a passive participle (e.g. English I have said);
• a preponderance of generalizing predicates to encode experiencers, i.e. experiencers appear as surface subjects in nominative case (e.g. English I like music instead of Music pleases me, though compare Italian Mi piace la musica and German Musik gefällt mir, which are of the form "Music pleases me")
• a passive construction formed with a passive participle plus an intransitive copula-like verb (e.g. English I am known);
• a prominence of anticausative verbs in inchoative-causative pairs (e.g. Russian inchoative anticausative izmenit’-sja 'to change (intransitive)' is derived from causative izmenit’ 'to change [something], make [something] change')
• dative external possessors (e.g. German Die Mutter wusch dem Kind die Haare "The mother washed the child's hair" (lit. "The mother washed the hair to the child"), Portuguese Ela lavou-lhe o cabelo "She washed his hair" (lit. "She washed him the hair")
• negative indefinite pronouns without verbal negation (e.g. German Niemand kommt "nobody comes" vs. Modern Greek κανένας δεν ερχεται "nobody (lit. not) comes")
• particle comparatives in comparisons of inequality (e.g. English bigger than an elephant)
• equative constructions (i.e. constructions for comparison of equality) based on adverbial relative-clause structures, e.g. Occitan tan grand coma un elefant, Russian tak že X kak Y, where coma/kak (historically coming from the adverbial interrogative pronoun "how") are "adverbial relative pronouns" according to Haspelmath
• subject person affixes as strict agreement markers, i.e. the verb is inflected for person and number of the subject, but subject pronouns may not be dropped even when this would be unambiguous (only in some languages, such as German and French)
• differentiation between intensifiers and reflexive pronouns (e.g. German intensifier selbst vs. reflexive sich)

Besides these features, which are uncommon outside Europe and thus useful for defining the SAE area, Haspelmath (2001) lists further features characteristic of European languages (but also found elsewhere):

• verb-initial order in yes/no questions;
• comparative inflection of adjectives (e.g. English bigger);
• For conjunctions of noun phrases, SAE languages prefer "A and-B" instead of "A-and B", "A-and B-and", "A B-and", or the comitative "with";
• syncretism of instrumental and comitative cases (e.g. English I cut my food with a knife when eating with my friends);
• suppletivism
  in second vs. two;
• lack of distinction between alienable (e.g. legal property) and inalienable (e.g. body part) possession;
• lack of distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns ("we and you" vs. "we and not you");
• lack of productive usage of reduplication;
• topic and focus
  expressed by intonation and word order;
• word order
  subject–verb–object
  ;
• only one
  example needed
  ];
• specific construction for negative coordination (e.g. English neither...nor...);
• phasal adverbs (e.g. English already, still, not yet);
• tendency towards replacement of past tense by the perfect.

There is also a broad agreement in the following parameters (not listed in Haspelmath 2001):^{[citation needed]}

• absence of phonemic opposition velar/uvular;
• phonemic voicing oppositions (/p/ vs. /b/ etc.);
• initial consonant clusters of the type "stop+sonorant" allowed;
• only pulmonic consonants;
• at least three degrees of vowel height (minimum inventory i e a o u);
• lack of lateral fricatives and affricates;
• predominantly suffixing morphology;
• moderately synthetic fusional morphological typology;
• nominative–accusative morphosyntactic alignment.

The Sprachbund defined this way consists of the following languages:^[3]

• Germanic languages;
• Romance languages;
• Baltic languages;
• Slavic languages;
• Albanian;
• Greek
  ;
• the "westernmost" Finno-Ugric languages.

The Balkan sprachbund is thus included as a subset of the larger SAE, while Baltic Eastern Europe is a coordinate member.

Not all the languages listed above show all the listed features, so membership in SAE can be described as gradient. Based on nine of the above-mentioned common features, Haspelmath regards French and German as forming the nucleus of the Sprachbund, surrounded by a core formed by English, the other Romance languages, the Nordic languages, and the Western and Southern Slavic languages. Hungarian, the Baltic languages, the Eastern Slavic languages, and the

• Eurolinguistics
• Languages of Europe

References

Bibliography

• ISBN 9783110171549. Archived from the original
  on 4 March 2019.
• Heine, Bernd and Kuteva, Tania. 2006. The Changing Languages of Europe. Oxford University Press.
• Van der Auwera, Johan. 2011. Standard Average European. In: Kortmann, B. & van der Auwera, J. (eds.) The Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide. (pp. 291–306) Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.[1]