Preface; 1. Areas, areal features and areality Raymond Hickey; Part I. Issues in Areal Linguistics: 2. Why is it so hard to define a linguistic area? Lyle Campbell; 3. Areas and universals Balthasar Bickel; 4. Reassessing sprachbunds: a view from the Balkans Victor A. Friedman and Brian D. Joseph; 5. Areal sound patterns: from perceptual magnets to stone soup Juliette Blevins; 6. Convergence and divergence in the phonology of the languages of Europe Thomas Stolz and Nataliya Levkovych; 7. Word prominence and areal linguistics Harry van der Hulst, Rob Goedemans and Keren Rice; 8. Semantic patterns from an areal perspective Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm and Henrik Liljegren; Part II. Case Studies for Areal Linguistics: 9. The Germanic languages and areal linguistics Johan van der Auwera and Daniël Van Olmen; 10. Britain and Ireland Raymond Hickey; 11. Varieties of English Bernd Kortmann and Verena Schröter; 12. Slavic languages Alan Timberlake; 13. The Caucasus Sven Grawunder; 14. Western Asia Geoffrey Haig; 15. An areal view of Africa Bernd Heine and Anne-Maria Fehn; 16. Areal contact in Nilo-Saharan Gerrit Dimmendaal; 17. Niger-Congo languages Jeff Good; 18. The Kalahari Basin area as a 'sprachbund' before the Bantu expansion Tom Güldemann and Anne-Maria Fehn; 19. South Africa and areal linguistics Rajend Mesthrie; 20. Jharkhand as a 'linguistic area' John Peterson; 21. Sri Lanka and South India Umberto Ansaldo; 22. The Transeurasian languages Martine Robbeets; 23. The changing profile of case marking in the northeastern Siberia area Gregory D. S. Anderson; 24. Languages of China in their East and Southeast Asian context Hilary Chappell; 25. Language in the mainland Southeast Asia area N. J. Enfield; 26. Southeast Asian tone in areal perspective James Kirby and Marc Brunelle; 27. The areal linguistics of Australia Louisa Miceli and Alan Dench; 28. Languages of the New Guinea region Malcolm Ross; 29. Languages of Eastern Melanesia Paul Geraghty; 30. The Western Micronesian Sprachbund Anthony P. Grant; 31. Native North American languages Marianne Mithun; 32. The areal linguistics of Amazonia Patience Epps and Lev Michael; 33. Linguistic areas, linguistic convergence, and river systems in South America Pieter Muysken, Joshua Birchall, Rik van Gijn, Olga Krasnouhova and Neele Müller.