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Wanderwörter are a problematic set of words in historical linguistics. They usually make up a small proportion of the total vocabulary of individual languages, and only a minority of loanwords. They are, however, found frequently in languages from across the world. There is, to our knowledge, no general synthesis of Wanderwörter patterns, causes of exceptionally high borrowing rates for particular lexical items, or estimates of their frequency across language families. Claims about the causes of their spread exist, but have not been widely tested. Nor, despite researchers’ intuitions that Wanderwörter form a distinct type of borrowing, is there a clear demonstration that Wanderwörter are, in fact, different from other loanwords in any concrete way. In the present paper, we examine the phenomenon of Wanderwörter using a standard sample of vocabulary in languages of Australia, North America and South America. The investigation presented here examines Wanderwörter in great enough detail to answer questions about the linguistic and social processes by which Wanderwörter migrate as well as the shapes and densities of the resulting networks. We show that Wanderwörter can be categorically distinguished from other borrowing. The study of Wanderwörter to date has focused on agricultural or industrialized societies; however, the phenomenon is well attested in networks of smaller languages. There are areal differences in types of Wanderwörter and the networks through which they spread. Specific categories of cultural association, including but not limited to agricultural cultivation, condition widespread borrowing. Wanderwörter are outliers in the realm of loanwords, borrowed far more frequently than typical lexical items but still a subset of a more general phenomenon. We show that the link between Wanderwörter and cultural diffusion may be a more sound basis for defining this term than the traditional definitions that invoke the loan frequency, areality, or untraceability of these terms.

The notion that linguistic forms and meanings are related only by convention and not by any direct relationship between sounds and semantic concepts is a foundational principle of modern linguistics. Though the principle generally holds across the lexicon, systematic exceptions have been identified. These "sound symbolic" forms have been identified in lexical items and linguistic processes in many individual languages. This paper examines sound symbolism in the languages of Australia. We conduct a statistical investigation of the evidence for several common patterns of sound symbolism, using data from a sample of 120 languages. The patterns examined here include the association of meanings denoting "smallness" or "nearness" with front vowels or palatal consonants, and the association of meanings denoting "largeness" or "distance" with back vowels or velar consonants. Our results provide evidence for the expected associations of vowels and consonants with meanings of "smallness" and "proximity" in Australian languages. However, the patterns uncovered in this region are more complicated than predicted. Several sound-meaning relationships are only significant for segments in prominent positions in the word, and the prevailing mapping between vowel quality and magnitude meaning cannot be characterized by a simple link between gradients of magnitude and vowel F2, contrary to the claims of previous studies.