Phonological distances between Eurasian lects measured via Phonotacticon 1.0 reveal areal patterns

Abstract The present study measures the phonological distances between 335 spoken lects of Eurasia using Phonotacticon 1.0, a cross-linguistic database, and explores whether phonologically similar lects form areal patterns within Eurasia. Results indicate that phonological clusters tend to form geographical clusters, which divides Eurasia horizontally into eastern (East/Southeast Asia), central (South/Central/North/West Asia), and western (Europe) regions. The convergence patterns in the phonological domain overlap with morphosyntactic convergence patterns measured via Grambank to some degree, but not entirely, suggesting the domain-specific nature of areal convergence. Finally, comparison with the genealogical distances between the sample lects shows that morphosyntactic distances, but not phonological distances, are significantly correlated with the number of shared genealogical layers, implying that morphosyntax is more conservative to genealogical heritage compared to phonology.