Linguistic distance and crosslinguistic influence: Commentary

This commentary addresses three issues that arise in the context of linguistic distance and crosslinguistic differences, namely how linguistic distance is defined, how linguistic distance translates into linguistic knowledge, and what the relationship is between linguistic distance and crosslinguistic influence. As far as distance is concerned, articles in this issue differ as to whether they adopt external or internal measures of language distance, raising the question of how externally defined language relatedness translates into the internalized grammar of an individual learner. As for crosslinguistic differences, there is an assumption in some of the articles that the more different/typologically apart the languages are, the harder the second language (L2) will be to acquire and the greater the prospect of first language (L1) transfer. In contrast, several articles show that typological closeness does not necessarily facilitate acquisition, while distance does not impede it. Discrepancies and commonalities between the various approaches are discussed.