Standard Average European (SAE) is a concept introduced by Benjamin Whorf

Benjamin Whorf

In studying the cause of a fire which had started under the conditions just described, Whorf concluded that it was thinking of the "empty" gasoline drums as "empty" in the meaning described in the first definition above, that is as "inert," which led to a fire he investigated...

 to group the modern, Indo-European

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...

 languages of Europe

Languages of Europe

Most of the languages of Europe belong to Indo-European language family. These are divided into a number of branches, including Romance, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Greek, and others. The Uralic languages also have a significant presence in Europe, including the national languages Hungarian, Finnish,...

 in the sense of a Sprachbund

Sprachbund

A Sprachbund – also known as a linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area or language crossroads – is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity and language contact. They may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related...

.
The more central members of the SAE Sprachbund are Romance

Romance languages

The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...

 and West Germanic, i.e. the literary language

Literary language

A literary language is a register of a language that is used in literary writing. This may also include liturgical writing. The difference between literary and non-literary forms is more marked in some languages than in others...

s of Europe which have seen substantial cultural influence from Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 during the medieval period.
The North Germanic

North Germanic languages

The North Germanic languages or Scandinavian languages, the languages of Scandinavians, make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages, along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages...

 and Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...

an languages (Baltic

Baltic languages

The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe...

 and Slavic

Slavic languages

The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic...

) tend to be more peripheral members.

According to Whorf, people whose languages have very different systems of grammar perceive reality in different ways and conceive of it in different forms. He further hypothesized that language wields a profound influence on human thought — this is known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view...

.
Though the hypothesis has largely been rejected by linguists, the concept of Standard Average European as a group of languages with many related features has remained.

Alexander Gode

Alexander Gode

Alexander Gottfried Friedrich Gode-von Aesch or simply Alexander Gode was a German-American linguist, translator and the driving force behind the creation of the auxiliary language Interlingua.-Biography:Born to a German father and a Swiss mother, Gode studied at the University of Vienna and the...

, who was instrumental in the development of Interlingua

Interlingua

Interlingua is an international auxiliary language , developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association...

, characterized this language as "Standard Average European".http://www.myhomeoffice-online.com/interlinguaus/pakupaku/uploads/GodeManifestodeInterlingua.pdfhttp://www.interlingua.fi/amercana.htm
The Romance, Germanic, and Slavic control languages of Interlingua are reflective of the language groups most often included in the SAE Sprachbund. Piron described the vocabulary of Esperanto as being largely Romance and especially French, with Germanic and Slavic elements. http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiatic.htm. However, Piron did not describe Esperanto as being Standard Average European.

Standard Average European as a Sprachbund

According to Martin Haspelmath

Martin Haspelmath

Prof. Dr. Martin Haspelmath is a German linguist working in the field of linguistic typology. He is one of the editors of the World Atlas of Language Structures, and has worked on the Standard Average European sprachbund. Besides typology, his research interests include syntactic and morphological...

 (2001), the SAE languages form a Sprachbund characterized by the following features, sometimes called "euroversals" by analogy with linguistic universal

Linguistic universal

A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of...

s:

1. definite and indefinite article
   Article (grammar)
   An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and some...
   
   s (e.g. English the vs. a);
2. postnominal relative clause
   Relative clause
   A relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun phrase, most commonly a noun. For example, the phrase "the man who wasn't there" contains the noun man, which is modified by the relative clause who wasn't there...
   
   s with inflected, resumptive relative pronoun
   Relative pronoun
   A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause within a larger sentence. It is called a relative pronoun because it relates the relative clause to the noun that it modifies. In English, the relative pronouns are: who, whom, whose, whosever, whosesoever, which, and, in some...
   
   s (e.g. English who vs. whose);
3. a periphrastic perfect formed with 'have' plus a passive participle (e.g. English I have said);
4. a preponderance of generalizing predicates to encode experiencers, i.e. experiencers appear as surface subjects in nominative case
   Nominative case
   The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments...
   
   , e.g. English I like music instead of Music pleases me);
5. a passive construction formed with a passive participle plus an intransitive copula-like verb (e.g. English I am known);
6. a prominence of anticausative verb
   Anticausative verb
   An anticausative verb is an intransitive verb that shows an event affecting its subject, while giving no semantic or syntactic indication of the cause of the event. The single argument of the anticausative verb is a patient, that is, an experiencer...
   
   s in inchoative-causative pairs (e.g. in the pair The snow melts vs. The flame melts the ice, the intransitive verb
   Intransitive verb
   In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb that has no object. This differs from a transitive verb, which takes one or more objects. Both classes of verb are related to the concept of the transitivity of a verb....
   
    is derived from the transitive);
7. dative
   Dative case
   The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink"....
   
    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);
8. verbal negation with a negative indefinite (e.g. English Nobody listened);
9. particle comparatives in comparisons of inequality (e.g. English bigger than an elephant) ;
10. equative constructions based on adverbial-relative clause structures (e.g. French grand comme un élephant);
11. subject person affixes as strict agreement
    Agreement (linguistics)
    In languages, agreement or concord is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates....
    
     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, French and Spoken Finnish
    Spoken Finnish
    Colloquial Finnish is the "dialectless" colloquial standard of the Finnish language. It is spoken in the Greater Helsinki region, and in urbanized areas in the Tavastian and Central Finland dialectal areas, such as the cities of Jyväskylä, Lahti, Hyvinkää, and Hämeenlinna...
    
    , e.g. mä oon, I am and sä oot, you are );
12. differentiation between intensifiers and reflexive pronoun
    Reflexive pronoun
    A reflexive pronoun is a pronoun that is preceded by the noun, adjective, adverb or pronoun to which it refers within the same clause. In generative grammar, a reflexive pronoun is an anaphor that must be bound by its antecedent...
    
    s (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):

1. verb-initial order in yes/no questions;
2. comparative inflection of adjectives (e.g. English bigger);
3. conjunction A, B and C;
4. syncretism of comitative
   Comitative case
   The comitative case , also known as the associative case , is a grammatical case that denotes companionship, and is used where English would use "in company with" or "together with"...
   
    and instrumental
   Instrumental case
   The instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action...
   
    cases (e.g. English with my friends vs. with a knife);
5. suppletivism in second vs. two;
6. no distinction between alienable (e.g. legal property) and inalienable
   Inalienable possession
   In linguistics, inalienable possession refers to the linguistic properties of certain nouns or nominal morphemes based on the fact that they are always possessed. The semantic underpinning is that entities like body parts and relatives do not exist apart from a possessor. For example, a hand...
   
    (e.g. body part) possession;
7. no distinction between inclusive ("we and you") and exclusive ("we and not you") first-person plural pronouns;
8. no productive usage of reduplication
   Reduplication
   Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word is repeated exactly or with a slight change....
   
   ;
9. topic and focus expressed by intonation and word order;
10. word order subject–verb–object;
11. only one gerund
    Gerund
    In linguistics* As applied to English, it refers to the usage of a verb as a noun ....
    
    , preference for finite subordinate clauses;
12. specific "neither-nor" construction;
13. phrasal adverbs (e.g. English already, still, not yet);
14. tendency towards replacement of past tense
    Past tense
    The past tense is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment , or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future...
    
     by the perfect.

There is also a broad agreement in the following parameters (not listed in Haspelmath 2001):

• absence of phonemic opposition velar
  Velar consonant
  Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....
  
  /uvular
  Uvular consonant
  Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be plosives, fricatives, nasal stops, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and...
  
  ;
• phonemic voicing oppositions (/p/ vs. /b/ etc.);
• initial consonant clusters of the type "stop+sonorant" allowed;
• only pulmonic consonant
  Pulmonic consonant
  A pulmonic consonant is a consonant produced by air pressure from the lungs, as opposed to ejective, implosive and click consonants.Most languages have only pulmonic consonants...
  
  s;
• at least three degrees of vowel height (minimum inventory i e a o u);
• lack of lateral
  Lateral consonant
  A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth....
  
   fricatives and affricates;
• predominantly suffixing morphology;
• moderately synthetic fusional
  Fusional language
  A fusional language is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to overlay many morphemes in a way that can be difficult to segment....
  
   morphological typology;
• nominative–accusative morphosyntactic alignment
  Morphosyntactic alignment
  In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the system used to distinguish between the arguments of transitive verbs and those of intransitive verbs...
  
  .

The Sprachbund defined this way consists of the following languages:

• Germanic languages
  Germanic languages
  The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
  
  ;
• Romance languages
  Romance languages
  The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
  
  ;
• Baltic languages
  Baltic languages
  The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe...
  
  ;
• Slavic languages
  Slavic languages
  The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic...
  
  ;
• Albanian
  Albanian language
  Albanian is an Indo-European language spoken by approximately 7.6 million people, primarily in Albania and Kosovo but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, southern Serbia and northwestern Greece...
  
  ;
• Greek;
• Hungarian
  Hungarian language
  Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
  
  .

The Balkan sprachbund is thus included as a subset of larger SAE.

Not all the languages listed above show all the listed features; the western European languages show more SAE features than the eastern and northern ones, with German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, Dutch

Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...

, French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, Occitan and the Northern Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

 languages at the core of the Sprachbund. All SAE languages except Hungarian are Indo-European languages

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...

, but not all Indo-European languages are SAE languages: the Celtic

Insular Celtic languages

Insular Celtic languages are those Celtic languages that originated in the British Isles, in contrast to the Continental Celtic languages of mainland Europe and Anatolia. All surviving Celtic languages are from the Insular Celtic group; the Continental Celtic languages are extinct...

, Armenian and Indo-Iranian languages

Indo-Iranian languages

The Indo-Iranian language group constitutes the easternmost extant branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It consists of three language groups: the Indo-Aryan, Iranian and Nuristani...

 remain outside the SAE Sprachbund (as do the non-Indo-European languages of Europe other than Hungarian).

The Standard Average European Sprachbund is most likely the result of ongoing language contact

Language contact

Language contact occurs when two or more languages or varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics.Multilingualism has likely been common throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual...

 beginning in the time of the Migration Period

Migration Period

The Migration Period, also called the Barbarian Invasions , was a period of intensified human migration in Europe that occurred from c. 400 to 800 CE. This period marked the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages...

and continuing during the Middle Ages

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

 and the Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

.
Inheritance of the SAE features from Proto-Indo-European

Proto-Indo-European language

The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

can be ruled out because Proto-Indo-European, as currently reconstructed, lacked most of the SAE features.