Europe as a Linguistic Area

The article addresses the issue of whether Europe deserves to be classified as a distinct linguistic area. The history of ideas of the topic at hand is briefly discussed before various more recent contributions to the areal linguistics of the European continent are discussed in some detail. Special emphasis is put on methodological problems connected with the notions of Sprachbund and linguistic area. Standard Average European (SAE) is closely scrutinized by way of discussing the possibility of postulating a competing area (‘non-Standard Average European’). With a view to establishing the relationship between the two supposedly coexisting areas, a selection of phenomena are reviewed as to their geolinguistic distribution.