In addition to classifying languages on the basis of specific structural characteristics that they display in their morphologies, we can look at typological patterns in a more global way. There are two ways to do this. We can look at whether there are sorts of morphology that tend to be prevalent in particular language families or sub-families. And we may look at whether there are specific sorts of morphology that tend to be found in certain geographic areas even among languages that belong to different language families.

We can give several examples of genetic tendencies. If we look, for example, at compounding in two different branches of the IndoEuropean family, Italic (Romance) and Germanic, we can see an interesting pattern: although both branches make use of compounds, the sorts of compounds they favor are quite different.

Germanic languages like English tend to favor endocentric attributive and subordinate compounds like those in (51a), whereas Italic languages seem to prefer exocentric subordinate compounds, and have few attributive compounds.

Another example comes from the Bantu sub-family of languages. It is relatively rare in the languages of the world for inflectional morphology to be accomplished predominantly by prefixing. Nevertheless, there is a large concentration of such languages in the central and southern parts of Africa. This is the area of Africa in which we find the Bantu languages which are in turn part of the larger Niger-Congo family. Bantu languages frequently inflect nouns and verbs by adding prefixes.

As for areal tendencies, Whaley (1997: 13) gives a fascinating example. He points out that three languages spoken in close proximity in the Balkan region of Europe all mark the definiteness of nouns by adding a suffix:

What makes this example so interesting is that these three languages belong to completely different sub-families of Indo-European – Albanian forms its own branch; Bulgarian is Balto-Slavic; and Rumanian is Italic – and none of the other languages in these three branches show definiteness with suffixes! Geographic proximity can be the only explanation for the distribution of this morphological trait.

Another example of a morphological pattern that is especially prevalent in a particular geographic region is verbal compounding. English rarely compounds two verbs (although there are a few examples like stir-fry or slam-dunk). In contrast, verbal compounds are not at all unusual in Asia, even in genetically unrelated languages. For example, although Japanese is thought to be a language isolate (it is not related to any language family), and Mandarin Chinese is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family, both display verbal compounds, as the examples in (53) show:

It would be interesting to explore the historical and social forces that lead languages in the same geographic area to develop similar morphological patterns, but we will not do so here.