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E-book Language Dispersal Beyond Farming

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Penilaian

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Just as plant and animal lineages are not uniformly distributed around the world, the same is true for the distribution of language families. As of 2017 the Ethnologue list includes around 50 distinct language families covering 7099 living languages, some of which, like Austronesian, have spread over a huge geographical range while others, like Amuric, have only a single living member (i.e., Nivkh) and are geographically very restricted. The uneven geographical distribution of language families across the world calls for an explanation of why some languages wither and die, while others prosper and spread. A major reason proposed to explain the spread of many of the world’s large language families is agriculture. This proposal, advanced by Renfrew (1987), Bellwood & Renfrew (2002), Diamond & Bellwood (2003) and Bellwood (2005, 2011) is known under the label “Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis”. The hypothesis posits that many of the world’s major lan-guage families owe their dispersal to the adoption of agriculture by their early speakers. In this context, farming or agriculture is generally understood in its re-stricted sense of economic dependence on the cultivation of crops and does not usually include the raising of animals as livestock.Since farming can unquestionably support far greater population densities than hunting and gathering, the basic logic behind this hypothesis is that population growth steadily pushed the early farmers and their language into wider territories, displacing the languages of preexisting hunter-gatherer populations. Indeed, agri-culture is argued to be one of the major factors causing dispersal in families such as Indo-European (Renfrew 1987; Comrie 2002; Gray & Atkinson 2003) in Europe, Bantu (Philipson 2002) and Semitic (Diakonoff 1998) in Africa, Austronesian (Blust 1995, 2013; Pawley 2002; Bellwood & Dizon 2008), Sino-Tibetan (Janhunen 1996: 222; LaPolla 2001; Sagart 2008, 2011), Tai-Kadai (Ostapirat 2005: 128), Austroasiatic (Higham 2002; Diffloth 2005; Sidwell & Blench 2011; Sagart 2011) and Dravidian (Fuller 2002) in Asia and Tupian, Arawakan (Aikhenvald 1999: 75) and Otomanguean (Kaufman 1990; Brown et al. 2013a/b, 2014a/b) in the Americas. 1In this volume, we would like to investigate to what extent the economic de-pendence on plant cultivation impacted language spread in various parts of the world, reassessing some of the above proposals and paying attention to language families that cannot unequivocally be regarded as instances of Farming/Language Dispersal, even if subsistence may have played a role in their expansion.In the contribution on Eskimo-Aleut by Anna Berge, it is clear that the expan-sion could not have been driven by agriculture because this widely spread language family never developed farming in the first place. Nevertheless, a hunter-gatherer subsistence strategy that provided access to relatively rich food resources had lin-guistic effects equivalent to those brought by agriculture.There are also contributions on widely spread language families, for which the ancestral vocabulary at best provides only a glimpse of agriculture, such as Trans-New Guinea by Schapper, Transeurasian by Robbeets, Turkic and Altaic by Savelyev and various macrofamilies in Eurasia by Starostin.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

417.7 ADE l

Penerbit

Amsterdam : John Benjamins Publishing Company., 2017

Deskripsi Fisik

340 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9789027212559

Klasifikasi

417.7

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Historical Linguistic, Diachronic Linguistic

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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