Martin Haspelmath's  research interests in linguistics are primarily in broadly comparative and historical morphology and syntax as well as language contact. He started out with a focus on European languages ("The European linguistic area", 2001), in particular Lezgian (A grammar of Lezgian, 1993), but more recently he sees himself as a generalist whose primary concern is the discovery and explanation of linguistic universals (The World Atlas of Language Structures, 2005; "Parametric versus functional explanation of syntactic universals", 2008). He has also been active in the area of comparative studies of lexical borrowing (Loanwords in the world's languages, 2009) and creole and pidgin languages (Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures, 2013).