Estimating areal effects in typology: a case study of African phoneme inventories

Abstract In this paper, we combine several statistical techniques (multivariate probit models, Gaussian processes, and phylogenetic regression) into a new approach for exploring the areal patterns associated with the presence and absence of typological features. This model allows us to estimate and control for areal and genetic effects, the correlations between features, and their expected frequency of occurrence in the data. We use this model to explore the distribution of consonants in African languages, inferring several linguistic areas which have been proposed in the literature. Our results suggest that the combination of these methods is a promising new way of approaching language contact.