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 numbe r of hypotheses that posit global trends. Givon (1979), for instance, posit s 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 largel y responsible for the posited growth in SVO languages. Nichols (1992) inter prets the global distribution of certain morphosyntactic features as reflec ting large-scale drift, and the distribution of ergativity is suggestive of such a widespread change. But apart from these putative large-scale change s, there is evidence of an emerging global trend that results from the poli tical dominance of European, international languages such as English. It is well known that this dominance has led to loss of diversity and overrepres entation of the type represented by these languages. Not so well known is t he effect international languages are having on the grammar of various othe r languages. Me may be seeing the emergence of a global linguistic area.