Editing Sprachbund (section)

===Indian subcontinent===
In a classic 1956 paper titled "India as a Linguistic Area", [[Murray Emeneau]] laid the groundwork for the general acceptance of the concept of a sprachbund. In the paper, Emeneau observed that the subcontinent's [[Dravidian languages|Dravidian]] and [[Indo-Aryan languages]] shared a number of features that were not inherited from a common source, but were [[areal features]], the result of diffusion during sustained contact. These include [[retroflex consonant]]s, [[echo word]]s, [[subject–object–verb]] word order, [[discourse marker]]s, and the [[quotative]].<ref>{{cite journal
| last = Emeneau | first = Murray | year = 1956 | title = India as a Linguistic Area | journal = Language | volume = 32 | issue = 1 | pages = 3–16 | doi=10.2307/410649 | jstor = 410649}}</ref>

Emeneau specified the tools to establish that language and culture had fused for centuries on the Indian soil to produce an integrated mosaic of structural convergence of four distinct language families: [[Indo-Aryan languages|Indo-Aryan]], [[Dravidian languages|Dravidian]], [[Munda languages|Munda]] and [[Tibeto-Burman]]. This concept provided scholarly substance for explaining the underlying Indian-ness of apparently divergent cultural and linguistic patterns. With his further contributions, this area has now become a major field of research in language contact and convergence.<ref name="Thomason (2000)"/><ref>{{cite book | last1=Emeneau | first1=Murray | last2=Dil | first2=Anwar | title=Language and Linguistic Area: Essays by Murray B. Emeneau | year=1980 | place=Palo Alto | publisher=Stanford University Press | isbn=978-0-8047-1047-3 }}</ref><ref>{{cite book | title = Language contact | first = Sarah Grey | last = Thomason | publisher = Edinburgh University Press | year = 2001 | isbn = 978-0-7486-0719-8 | pages = 114–117}}</ref>