[gillesjacobs]

The field of study is called linguistic typology.

During my linguistic studies, the course material was comprised of the Oxford and Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology (and a bunch of papers on specific linguistic features). But the Oxford handbook is a very good start.

It's a very cool field of study that will allow you to identify commonalities across languages and the differences between them. A good typologist should be able the be dropped in a completely unknown language context and learn the features from use (which was basically our exam).