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The review assesses the collection "Areal diffusion and genetic inheritance," highlighting the exploration of inherited versus borrowed linguistic features, particularly in the context of Dixon's punctuated equilibrium model. The text critiques Dixon's assertions regarding Australian languages and discusses the implications for understanding global linguistic diversity. Additionally, a separate volume on universal properties of the language faculty within the principles and parameters paradigm is summarized, noting its contributions to the study of language variation and cross-linguistic differences.
Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, 2017
When looking to language data as a source of information on human (pre)history, linguistic areas have long been the very poor relation of language families. Both within linguistics, and in conjunction with archaeology and genetics, far less attention has been paid to convergence areas than to diverging families. Yet human populations have inevitably interacted in complexes of both convergent and divergent processes. This holds in linguistics no less than in culture and genetics: witness Matisoff’s (1990: 113) “Sinosphere” vs. “Indosphere”, two contrasting areal convergence zones, but within the same diverging Tibeto-Burman family. This imbalance between families and areas distorts and diminishes what we can learn from comparative linguistics, both historical and typological. It also means that we have much to gain if we can rebalance, to look much more seriously at the real-world contexts through (pre)history in which linguistic areas arose. Archaeologists and geneticists, when faced with signals of convergence between human populations on the sociocultural and demographic levels, often still think only in terms of divergent families as the linguistic parallel — rather than the more natural fit with convergent areas, so little known outside linguistics. Linguistics, meanwhile, labours under its own misconceptions and outdated visions of other disciplines, in the balance between migratory and diffusionist interpretations of the human past. Explaining linguistic areas requires one to think in terms of demographic and socio-cultural processes radically different to those traditionally invoked to account for language family expansions. Or indeed, to rethink whether certain contexts and processes — trade, mobility, and so on — are good explanations for divergent families at all, when in fact they can be more plausible shapers of linguistic convergence areas instead. This contribution aims to set out some general first principles for a prehistory of language areas. These principles will be illustrated by cases drawn from a range of (pre)historic contexts from across the globe: Meso-America, the Andes and Amazonia, the Balkans, mainland south-east Asia, and the ‘Altaic’ zone of north-eastern Asia.
Since the beginning, studies of Indo-European have seen it as a large phenomenon necessarily having a large, usually single cause. Yet apparent pattern can arise from chance causes that need have no great historical order. In a minimalist view, set out here as a theoretical hypothesis, the pattern of Indo-European can simply arise from a kind of social Brownian motion, in which a large pattern invents itself out of countless little perturbations between adjacent language communities.
2015
Using three worldwide databases, we investigate how average similarity between pairs of languages and cultures are influenced by geographic distance and time of common ancestry. Generally, the similarity between languages or cultures decreases as the geographic distance increases. This occurs even for languages and cultures without a known common ancestor, suggesting the influence of diffusion. At any given distance, related languages are more similar than unrelated languages. However, remotely related cultures are no more similar than entirely unrelated ones, indicating that inherited cultural features tend to be lost more readily over time than inherited linguistic features.
… of language: proceedings of the 6th …, 2006
In a study by Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1988), the spread of anatomically modern man was reconstructed on the basis of genetic and linguistic pieces of evidence: the main conclusion was that these two approaches reflect a common underlying history, the history of our past still frozen in the genes of modern populations. The expression `genetic history' was introduced (Piazza et al. 1988) to point out that if today we find many genes showing the same geographical patterns in terms of their frequencies, this may be due to the common history of our species. A deeper exploration of the whole problem can be found in Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994). In the following, some specific cases of structural analogies between linguistic and genetic geographical patterns will be explored that supply further and more updated information. It is important to emphasize at the outset that evidence for coevolution of genes and languages in human populations does not suggest by itself that some genes of our species determine the way we speak; this coevolution may simply be due to a common mode of transmission and mutation of genetic and linguistic units of information and common constraints of demographic factors. 1. The Genetic Analysis of a Linguistic Isolate: The Basques The case of the Basques, a European population living in the area of the Pyrenees on the border of Spain and France who still speak a non-Indo-European language, is paradigmatic. What are the genetic relations between the Basques and their surrounding modern populations, all of whom are Indo-European speakers? Almost half a century ago it was suggested (Bosch-Gimpera 1943) that the Basques are the descendants of the populations who lived in Western Europe during the late Paleolithic period. Their withdrawal to the area of the Pyrenees, probably caused by different waves of invasion, left the Basques untouched by the Eastern European invasions of the Iron Age. In their study of the geographic distribution of Rh blood groups, Chalmers et al. (1948) pointed out that the Rh negative allele, which is found almost exclusively in Europe, has its highest frequency among the Basques. Chalmers et al. hypothesized that modern Basques may consist of a Palaeolithic population with an extremely high Rh negative frequency, who later mixed with people from the Mediterranean area. In more recent times genetic analyses have produced the following conclusions: (a) Mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA polymorphisms support the idea that the Basques are genetically different from the other modern European populations (Richards et al., 2000, 2002; Semino et al. 2000). (b) Mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA polymorphisms support the idea that the Basques are the descendants of a Palaeolithic population (Richards et al., 2000, 2002; Semino et al. 2000). The main haplogroups contributing to the European mitochondrial geography are H, pre-V, and U5. Haplogroup H is the most frequent haplogroup in both Europe and the Near East but occurs at frequencies of only 25% 30% in the Near East and the Caucasus, whereas the frequency is generally 50% in European populations and reaches a maximum of 60% in the Basque country. The age ranges of the mitochondrial founders of these lines are mostly palaeolithict: specifically the age ranges of the mitochondrial haplogroup V which is found at the highest frequency among the Basques and the Saami are preneolithic. In agreement with the suggestion proposed to explain the distribution of mtDNA haplogroup V (Torroni et al. 1998), the distributions of Y chromosome groups R* and R1a have been interpreted by Semino et al. (2000) to be the result of postglacial expansions from refugia within Europe. European mtDNA estimates the Neolithic component in the Basques to be the lowest for any region in Europe. Although the criteria used to identify Near Eastern founder types are somewhat heuristic and involve many assumptions, the relative number of types in different European populations should still be informative, and the Basque component, estimated at 7%, clearly lies outside the distribution for
The central hypothesis in this book is that geolinguistic patterns depend highly on our evolved temperaments based on subsistence strategies, i.e. foraging, farming and pastoralism. On the surface, this may not make much sense, as most of our ancestors first were foragers and then farmers. However, genetic research has shown that we are exactly a mix of these three “tribes”, with varying genetic admixture. I am arguing that most people fall into one of four temperaments based on subsistence: hunting, gathering, farming and herding. These subsistence strategies made an enormous difference on language dispersal and language change as each of them has got different dispersal patterns.
There are more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world today 1. It has been argued that the natural and social environment of languages drives this diversity 2-13. However, a fundamental question is how strong are environmental pressures , and does neutral drift suffice as a mechanism to explain diversification? We estimate the phylogenetic signals of geographic dimensions, distance to water, climate and population size on more than 6,000 phylogenetic trees of 46 language families. Phylogenetic signals of environmental factors are generally stronger than expected under the null hypothesis of no relationship with the shape of family trees. Importantly, they are also-in most cases-not compatible with neutral drift models of constant-rate change across the family tree branches. Our results suggest that language diversification is driven by further adaptive and non-adaptive pressures. Language diversity cannot be understood without modelling the pressures that physical, ecological and social factors exert on language users in different environments across the globe. Present-day linguistic diversity is non-randomly distributed across the globe, forming patterns at multiple levels. For example, more than 7,000 languages are currently spoken, and these can be classified into a few hundred language families 1. Each family contains (ideally) all-and only-descendants of a single ancestral pro-tolanguage. Given that languages evolve through time in a manner similar to the evolution of biological species-through splits, extinctions and horizontal exchange-a language family can be approximated by a structured family tree (or phylogeny) that comprises a set of languages spoken by actual human groups occupying geographical space. An intriguing observation is that not only individual languages are non-randomly distributed across the globe; language families are too: some families are huge, spanning vast areas, while others are much more circumscribed. It has been proposed that this patterning reflects ancestral historical events and processes, such as demographic migrations and spreads, or language shift through elite dominance 14. Additionally, there is an emerging view that language diversification cannot be fully understood except in the wider context of physical, cultural and biological variation 15-17. A fundamental question, then, is why and how do language family trees unfold? Is linguistic diversification a self-contained process, or do pressures related to geographic and demographic dimensions drive diversification and shape language family trees? The classic view holds that explanations of diversity have to be sought 'first on the basis of recognized processes of internal change' 18. Here, 'internal' changes are either seen as a 'rather directionless pursuit of individual forms down the branches of the family tree' 19 or as regular phenomena such as sound change and analogy 19. Internal changes are often associated with the term 'linguistic drift' 20 , which is theoretically distinct from 'population drift' (that is, the social or geographic isolation of speaker communities 21). However, in practice , Sapir 20 argued that both types of drift interact: variation in individual speakers' utterances accumulate and lead to the formation of dialects and, eventually, languages. The prediction of this account is that purely random variation in language usage could give rise to diversity by means of social and geographic isolation, corresponding to 'neutral drift' models in evolutionary biology. Accounts based on language internal change have come under criticism for underestimating the role of geography and demography. Nichols 2 has shown that language diversity is greater at low latitudes, along coastlines and in mountainous areas, among others. Nettle 3 found evidence for language density being influenced by ecological risk: areas that have longer growing seasons also support a larger number of languages-a finding that is corroborated by more recent statistical analyses 4. Other studies investigated global linguistic diversity in relation to geographic and demographic data (see Gavin et al. 5 for a review). Predictors of linguistic diversity include latitude 6,7 , altitude and rugosity 4 , temperature and rainfall 7-12 , political complexity, and subsistence strategy 13 , as well as island size in the Pacific 11. However, it is a standard procedure in evolutionary biology to test neutral drift models before further adaptive processes are invoked for explanation. As pointed out in an overview article by Gavin et al. 5 , our understanding of linguistic diversification is still rudimentary. The mechanisms of neutral change, movement, contact and selection have not been disentangled yet. Here, we test different evolutionary models by adding a phylogenetic dimension. This allows us to investigate how strong the links between family tree structure and environmental factors are on a global scale. In evolutionary biology, the strength of the association between population level traits and a given phylogeny is measured using the so-called phylogenetic signal 22,23. Estimating phylogenetic signals, we test three fundamental hypotheses: • Independent evolution hypothesis (H 0). 'Internal' linguistic properties and 'external' environmental factors generally evolve independently: there is no link between environmental factors and the shape of language family trees (that is, their values are randomly distributed across the tips of the trees) and phyloge-netic signals are close-or equal-to zero); • Neutral evolution hypothesis (H 1). Internal properties and environmental factors are linked via neutral drift: the values of the environmental factors follow the predictions of a Brownian motion model (that is, a constant-rate random walk along the branches of the family trees) and phylogenetic signals are close to one;
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2012
Journal of anthropological sciences = Rivista di antropologia : JASS / Istituto italiano di antropologia, 2013
2011
Using three worldwide databases, we investigate how average similarity between pairs of languages and cultures are influenced by geographic distance and time of common ancestry. Generally, the similarity between languages or cultures decreases as the geographic distance increases. This occurs even for languages and cultures without a known common ancestor, suggesting the influence of diffusion. At any given distance, related languages are more similar than unrelated languages. However, remotely related cultures are no more similar than entirely unrelated ones, indicating that inherited cultural features tend to be lost more readily over time than inherited linguistic features.
François, Alexandre. (2014) Trees, Waves and Linkages: Models of Language Diversification. In Claire Bowern & Bethwyn Evans (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics. New York: Routledge, pp.161-189., 2014
Contrary to widespread belief, there is no reason to think that language diversification typically follows a tree-like pattern, consisting of a nested series of neat splits. Except for the odd case of language isolation or swift migration and dispersal, the normal situation is for language change to involve multiple events of diffusion across mutually intelligible idiolects in a network, typically distributed into conflicting isoglosses. Insofar as these events of language-internal diffusion are later reflected in descendant languages, the sort of language family they define – a “linkage” (Ross 1988) – is one in which genealogical relations cannot be represented by a tree, but only by a diagram in which subgroups intersect. Non-cladistic models are needed to represent language genealogy, in ways that take into account the common case of linkages and intersecting subgroups. This paper will focus on an approach that combines the precision of the Comparative Method with the realism of the Wave Model. This method, labeled Historical Glottometry, identifies genealogical subgroups in a linkage situation, and assesses their relative strengths based on the distribution of innovations among modern languages. Provided it is applied with the rigour inherent to the Comparative Method, Historical Glottometry should help unravel the genealogical structures of the world’s language families, by acknowledging the role played by linguistic convergence and diffusion in the historical processes of language diversification.
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