Quantifying areality: A study of prenasalisation in Southeast Asia and New Guinea

Although "areality" and the idea of a linguistic area has become well-established in the literature, the notions remain controversial, mainly because of the lack of agreement about what constitutes linguistic areality and the subjective nature of their definition. This article follows the lead of Nichols 1992 and Bickel & Nichols 2006 in using statistical techniques for analysing the distribution of variables in different populations. We examine the frequency of occurrence of plosive prenasalisation in the Southeast Asia/New Guinea region as a test case for the robustness of simple statistical techniques and of more sophisticated techniques specifically designed for modelling the spatial distribution of variables.