SINCE 1828
areal linguistics
noun
variants:
or less commonly area linguistics
Definition of areal linguistics
: a school of historical and comparative linguistics that denies the existence of phonetic laws without exceptions, questions the value of attempts to trace individual languages back to a common ancestral language, and chiefly emphasizes the study of the transmission through space of linguistic innovations which is considered as taking place quite readily even between languages that are not of common origin
— called also neolinguistics
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