Language Dispersal, Diversification, and Contact
Mily Crevels and Pieter Muysken
Abstract
How did languages spread across the globe? Why do we sometimes find large language families, distributed over a wider area, and sometimes clusters of very small families or language isolates (i.e. languages without known relatives)? What was the role of agriculture in language spread? What do different language ideologies and patterns of ethnic identity formation contribute? What influence do geography and climate have?The availability of increasingly large databases and new analytical research techniques make it possible to provide new answers to these long standing questions. This book focus ... More
How did languages spread across the globe? Why do we sometimes find large language families, distributed over a wider area, and sometimes clusters of very small families or language isolates (i.e. languages without known relatives)? What was the role of agriculture in language spread? What do different language ideologies and patterns of ethnic identity formation contribute? What influence do geography and climate have?The availability of increasingly large databases and new analytical research techniques make it possible to provide new answers to these long standing questions. This book focuses on patterns of language dispersal, diversification, and contact in a global perspective by comparing the complex language and population histories of Island Southeast Asia/Oceania, Africa, and South America in terms of history and patterns of settlement, conceptions of ethnicity, and communication strategies. These three regions were selected because they show interesting contrasts in the distribution of languages and language families.
Keywords:
language spread,
agriculture,
linguistic diversity,
language ideology,
ethnic identity,
Island Southeast Asia,
Oceania,
Africa,
South America
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198723813 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2020 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198723813.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Mily Crevels, editor
Senior University Lecturer in Linguistics, Leiden University
Pieter Muysken, editor
Professor of Linguistics, Radboud University Nijmegen
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