Global trends in language

A natural assumption in typology is that surveys taken at different periods of history would produce much the same profile. However, there are a number of hypotheses that posit global trends. Givon (1979), for instance, posits a long-term unidirectional change from SOV to SVO. Most SVO languages are clustered in large linguistic areas, SO it may be that diffusion is largely responsible for the posited growth in SVO languages. Nichols (1992) interprets the global distribution of certain morphosyntactic features as reflecting large-scale drift, and the distribution of ergativity is suggestive of such a widespread change. But apart from these putative large-scale changes, there is evidence of an emerging global trend that results from the political dominance of European, international languages such as English. It is well known that this dominance has led to loss of diversity and overrepresentation of the type represented by these languages. Not so well known is the effect international languages are having on the grammar of various other languages. We may be seeing the emergence of a global linguistic area.