RARE AND UNIQUE PHENOMENA IN LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD: WHY DO THEY CONCERN MORE THAN JUST TYPOLOGISTS? 2

This article provides an overview of rare and unique phenomena in the world’s languages as an important but insufficiently explored dimension of linguistic typology. While linguistic research has traditionally focused on identifying what languages have in common, recent studies increasingly draw attention to the specific and the exceptional. The paper presents examples of linguistic «unique features» across various levels: phonetic (exotic phonemes, extreme inventories of vowels and consonants, unusual prosodic patterns), morphological (unique cases, the highest number of cases, rare grammatical categories and classifiers), syntactic (atypical word order), lexical (distinctive vocabulary, unusual ratios of native to borrowed items), graphic (unique graphemes, alphabets, writing systems), and orthographic (non-standard capitalization and punctuation practices, degrees of correspondence between pronunciation and spelling).