Farming/language dispersal hypothesis

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The farming/language dispersal hypothesis [1] proposes that many of the largest language families in the world dispersed along with the expansion of agriculture. This hypothesis was proposed by archaeologists Peter Bellwood and Colin Renfrew. It has been widely debated and archaeologists, linguists, and geneticists often disagree with all or only parts of the hypothesis.

Contents

The hypothesis

Language families of the Old World and their suggested expansions Language families of the Old World and their suggested expansions.jpg
Language families of the Old World and their suggested expansions

The farming/language dispersal hypothesis links the spread of farming in pre-historic times with the spread of languages and language families. The hypothesis is that a language family begins when a society with its own language adopts farming as a primary means of subsistence while its neighbors are hunter-gatherers who speak unrelated languages. A sedentary farming society supports a much greater density of population than its neighboring nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers. The language of the farming society displaces that of the hunter-gatherer society which may also become agricultural. Farming and the language of the original farmers spread to more and more societies. In some cases the original language, which evolves over time into many different but related languages, has attained world-wide dispersion. [2] [3]

In sum, "the farming/language dispersal hypothesis makes the radical and controversial proposal that the present-day distributions of many of the world's languages and language families can be traced back to the early developments and dispersals of farming..." [4]

Examples

Indo-European

The Anatolian hypothesis states that Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in Anatolia throughout the Neolithic period, and that the spread of the Indo-European language was associated with the Neolithic Revolution of the 7th-6th millennium BC. It claims that the Proto-Indo-European language spread from Asia Minor to Europe around 7000 BC with the Neolithic Revolution and peacefully mixed with indigenous peoples. [5] Therefore, most Neolithic Europeans spoke an Indo-European language, and later migrations replaced it with another Indo-European language. However, there is currently more evidence that supports the Kurgan hypothesis, which is another explanation for the origin and dispersal of the Indo-European languages. [6] [7]

Bantu

The Bantu languages descend from a common Proto-Bantu language, which is believed to have been spoken in what is now Cameroon in Central Africa. [8] An estimated 2,500–3,000 years ago (1000 BC to 500 BC), speakers of the Proto-Bantu language began a series of migrations eastward and southward, carrying agriculture with them. This Bantu expansion came to dominate Sub-Saharan Africa east of Cameroon, an area where Bantu peoples now constitute nearly the entire population. [8] [9] Some other sources estimate the Bantu Expansion started closer to ~5,000 years ago. [10]

Afro-Asiatic

There are two hypotheses about the origin of the Proto-Afroasiatic languages, the Levant theory and the African continental theory. According to the theory of a homeland in Levant, the distribution was expanded to Africa in conjunction with the spread of agriculture. [11] [12] Terrazas Mata et al. (2013) have argued that the Proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers would have originated in the Middle East and subsequently migrated into the areas of North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. [13] There are however many scholars who accept an African phylum language origin since five of the six Afro-Asiatic subfamilies are spoken on the African continent, and only one in Asia. [14] Christopher Ehret, S.O. Y. Keita, and Paul Newman have also argued that archaeology does not indicate a spread of migrating farmers into northern Africa, but rather a gradual incorporation of animal husbandry into indigenous foraging cultures. [15]

Nostratic

Bomhard (2008) [16] suggested that the Proto-Nostratic language differentiated with the onset of the Levant Neolithic Revolution in 8,000 BC, and spread across Fertile crescent to Caucasus (Proto-Kartvelian), beyond Egypt and the Red Sea to Horn of Africa (Proto-Afro-Asiatic), to Iranian Plateau (Proto-Elamo-Dravidian), and to Central Asia (Proto-Eurasiatic, then Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Altaic, and Proto-Uralic in 5,000 BC).

Elamo-Dravidian

Elamo-Dravidian hypothetical language family is often associated with the spread of farming from the Fertile Crescent to the Indus Valley civilization. However, there is some disagreement regarding the linguistic relationship of Elamite with Dravidian languages. Genetic studies have detected a genetic link between Neolithic Iran and South Asians. [17]

Transeurasian

Martine Robbeets "Transeurasian" model, based on the Macro-Altaic languages (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Japonic, and Koreanic), argues that Proto-Transeurasian was spoken in Xinglongwa culture in the west Liao river basin in 6th millennium BC, and differentiated to the daughter languages along with the spread of millet agriculture. [18] [19]

Japonic

Many scholars believe that the Japonic language was brought from the Korean Peninsula to the Japanese archipelago around 700-300 BC by the Yayoi people who cultivated wet rice. [20] [21] According to Martine Robbeets (2017), Japonic language originated from Proto-"Transeurasian" language (the common ancestor of Mongolic, Turkic, Tungusic, Japonic, and Koreanic), located in the Xinglongwa culture in the 6th millennium BC. She suggest Proto-Transeurasian people cultivated millet, but after branching to the "Japono-Koreanic" language family in the Liaodong Peninsula, Proto-Japonic was influenced by Para-Austronesian who cultivated wet rice in the Shandong Peninsula in the 2nd-3rd millennium BC, borrowed a large amount of vocabulary mainly related to agriculture, and then went south on the Korean Peninsula and entered the Japanese archipelago in the 1st millennium BC. [22] It is also proposed that the distribution of Japanese has expanded with the expansion of wet rice cultivation in the Japanese archipelago. [23]

Austronesian

It is proposed that the spread of Austronesian languages was driven by farming. [24] [25] [26]

Sino-Tibetan

Since 2019, phylogenetic studies of 50 Sino-Tibetan languages that have existed from ancient times to the present day have proved the hypothesis that the language family expanded with agricultural transmission. It is concluded that the Sino-Tibetan language family originated from the millet farming people located in North China 7,200 years ago. [27] [28] [29] [30]

Austroasiatic

Several theories exist about the Urheimat of Austroasiatic languages; the Red River Delta, [31] the Mekong River region, [32] the Zhu River region, [33] the Yangtze River region, [34] [35] and the north of the Yangtze River. [36] [37] Proto-Austro-Asiatic speaking people were farmers who cultivated rice and millet and raised dogs, pigs, chickens, etc., but without millet cultivation (with only rice cultivation and some livestock farming), around 4500 BC, it reached Indochina and replaced native hunter-gatherers. [38]

Uto-Aztecan

It is suggested that Uto-Aztecan speakers expanded to Mesoamerica and Southwestern US with corn farming. [39] [40] [41]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Austroasiatic languages</span> Language family concentrated in Southeast Asia

The Austroasiatic languages are a large language family spoken throughout mainland Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia. These languages are natively spoken by the majority of the population in Vietnam and Cambodia, and by minority populations scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China. Approximately 117 million people speak an Austroasiatic language, of which more than two-thirds are Vietnamese speakers. Of the Austroasiatic languages, only Vietnamese, Khmer, and Mon have lengthy, established presences in the historical record. Only two are presently considered to be the national languages of sovereign states: Vietnamese in Vietnam, and Khmer in Cambodia. The Mon language is a recognized indigenous language in Myanmar and Thailand, while the Wa language is a 'recognized national language' in the de facto autonomous Wa State within Myanmar. Santali is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. The remainder of the family's languages are spoken by minority groups and have no official status.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Altaic languages</span> Hypothetical language family of Eurasia

Altaic is a controversial proposed language family that would include the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families and possibly also the Japonic and Koreanic languages. The hypothetical language family has long been rejected by most comparative linguists, although it continues to be supported by a small but stable scholarly minority. Speakers of the constituent languages are currently scattered over most of Asia north of 35° N and in some eastern parts of Europe, extending in longitude from the Balkan Peninsula to Japan. The group is named after the Altai mountain range in the center of Asia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Proto-Indo-Europeans</span> Hypothetical prehistoric ethnolinguistic group

The Proto-Indo-Europeans are a hypothetical prehistoric ethnolinguistic group of Eurasia who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Austronesian languages</span> Large language family mostly of Southeast Asia and the Pacific

The Austronesian languages are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan. They are spoken by about 386 million people. This makes it the fifth-largest language family by number of speakers. Major Austronesian languages include Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, Tagalog, Malagasy and Cebuano. According to some estimates, the family contains 1,257 languages, which is the second most of any language family.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Languages of Asia</span>

Asia is home to hundreds of languages comprising several families and some unrelated isolates. The most spoken language families on the continent include Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Japonic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Turkic, Sino-Tibetan, Kra–Dai and Koreanic. Many languages of Asia, such as Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, or Tamil, have a long history as a written language.

In historical linguistics, the homeland or Urheimat of a proto-language is the region in which it was spoken before splitting into different daughter languages. A proto-language is the reconstructed or historically-attested parent language of a group of languages that are genetically related.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neolithic Europe</span> Era of pre-history

The European Neolithic is the period from the arrival of Neolithic technology and the associated population of Early European Farmers in Europe, c. 7000 BC until c. 2000–1700 BC. The Neolithic overlaps the Mesolithic and Bronze Age periods in Europe as cultural changes moved from the southeast to northwest at about 1 km/year – this is called the Neolithic Expansion.

Old Europe is a term coined by the Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas to describe what she perceived as a relatively homogeneous pre-Indo-European Neolithic and Copper Age culture or civilisation in Southeast Europe, centred in the Lower Danube Valley. Old Europe is also referred to in some literature as the Danube civilisation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Austric languages</span> Hypothetical parent family of the Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages

The Austric languages are a proposed language family that includes the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Madagascar, as well as Kra–Dai and Austroasiatic languages spoken in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. A genetic relationship between these language families is seen as plausible by some scholars, but remains unproven.

The classification of the Japonic languages and their external relations is unclear. Linguists traditionally consider the Japonic languages to belong to an independent family; indeed, until the classification of Ryukyuan as separate languages within a Japonic family rather than as dialects of Japanese, Japanese was considered a language isolate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anatolian hypothesis</span> Theory of origin of Proto-Indo-Europeans

The Anatolian hypothesis, also known as the Anatolian theory or the sedentary farmer theory, first developed by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew in 1987, proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia. It is the main competitor to the Kurgan hypothesis, or steppe theory, which enjoys more academic favor.

Paleolithic migration prior to end of the Last Glacial Maximum spread anatomically modern humans throughout Afro-Eurasia and to the Americas. During the Holocene climatic optimum, formerly isolated populations began to move and merge, giving rise to the pre-modern distribution of the world's major language families.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Proto-Indo-European homeland</span> Prehistoric "Urheimat" of the Indo-European languages

The Proto-Indo-European homeland was the prehistoric linguistic homeland of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). From this region, its speakers migrated east and west, and went on to form the proto-communities of the different branches of the Indo-European language family.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Proto-Afroasiatic homeland</span> Hypothetical linguistic homeland of the Proto-Afroasiatic language

The Proto-Afroasiatic homeland is the hypothetical place where speakers of the Proto-Afroasiatic language lived in a single linguistic community, or complex of communities, before this original language dispersed geographically and divided into separate distinct languages. Afroasiatic languages are today mostly distributed in parts of Africa, and Western Asia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peopling of India</span> Immigration patterns of different races of people of India

The peopling of India refers to the migration of Homo sapiens into the Indian subcontinent. Anatomically modern humans settled India in multiple waves of early migrations, over tens of millennia. The first migrants came with the Coastal Migration/Southern Dispersal 65,000 years ago, whereafter complex migrations within South and Southeast Asia took place. West-Asian (Iranian) hunter-gatherers migrated to South Asia after the Last Glacial Period but before the onset of farming. Together with ancient South Asian hunter-gatherers they formed the population of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC).

Proto-Austroasiatic is the reconstructed ancestor of the Austroasiatic languages. Proto-Mon–Khmer has been reconstructed in Harry L. Shorto's Mon–Khmer Comparative Dictionary, while a new Proto-Austroasiatic reconstruction is currently being undertaken by Paul Sidwell.

There have been various classification schemes for Southeast Asian languages.

The East Asian languages are a language family proposed by Stanley Starosta in 2001. The proposal has since been adopted by George van Driem and others.

The means by which agriculture expanded into the Philippines is argued by many different anthropologists and an exact date of its origin is unknown. However, there are proxy indicators and other pieces of evidence that allow anthropologists to get an idea of when different crops reached the Philippines and how they may have gotten there. Rice is an important agricultural crop today in the Philippines and many countries throughout the world import rice and other products from the Philippines.

Martine Irma Robbeets is a Belgian comparative linguist and japanologist. She is known for the Transeurasian languages hypothesis, which groups the Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages together into a single language family.

References

  1. ↑ Higham, C. Chapter 18 Languages and Farming Dispersals: Austroasiatic Languages and Rice Cultivation (2003).
  2. ↑ Renfrew, Colin (January 1994). "World Linguistic Diversity". Scientific American. 270 (1): 116–123. Bibcode:1994SciAm.270a.116R. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0194-116. PMID   8284657 . Retrieved 6 January 2022.
  3. ↑ Robeets, Martine (2017). Chapter 1, Farming/Language Dispersal. Jena: John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 1–2. hdl:20.500.12657/29648. ISBN   9789027264640.
  4. ↑ "Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis". Ox Bow Books. Archived from the original on 18 June 2021. Retrieved 10 January 2022.
  5. ↑ Renfrew, Colin (1990) [1987]. Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-52-138675-3.
  6. ↑ Will Chang, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall, Andrew Garrett (2015). "Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis". Language. Linguistic Society of America. 91 (1): 193–244. doi:10.1353/lan.2015.0005. S2CID   143978664.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  7. ↑ Science News. 2015. “Genetic Study Revives Debate on Origin and Expansion of Indo-European Languages in Europe.” March 4, 2015. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150304075334.htm
  8. 1 2 Philip J. Adler, Randall L. Pouwels, World Civilizations: To 1700 Volume 1 of World Civilizations, (Cengage Learning: 2007), p.169.
  9. ↑ Toyin Falola, Aribidesi Adisa Usman, Movements, borders, and identities in Africa, (University Rochester Press: 2009), p.4.
  10. ↑ Gemma Berniell-Lee et al, "Genetic and Demographic Implications of the Bantu Expansion: Insights from Human Paternal Lineages" Archived 2011-04-16 at the Wayback Machine , Oxford Journals
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  13. ↑ Terrazas Mata, A. Serrano Sánchez, C. and Benavente, M. (2013). "The Late Peopling of Africa According to Craniometric Data. A Comparison of Genetic and Linguistic Models". Human Evolution. 28 (1–2): 1–12. Retrieved 27 March 2017.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  14. ↑ Mc Call, Daniel F. (1998). "The Afroasiatic Language Phylum: African in Origin, or Asian?". Current Anthropology. 39 (1): 139–144. doi:10.1086/204702. ISSN   0011-3204. JSTOR   10.1086/204702.
  15. ↑ Ehret, Christopher; Keita, S. O. Y.; Newman, Paul; Bellwood, Peter (2004). "The Origins of Afroasiatic". Science. 306 (5702): 1680–1681. doi:10.1126/science.306.5702.1680c. ISSN   0036-8075. JSTOR   3839746. PMID   15576591. S2CID   8057990.
  16. ↑ Bomhard, Allan R. (2008). Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic: Comparative Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary, 2 volumes. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-16853-4
  17. ↑ Sylvester, Charles (2019), "Maternal genetic link of a south Dravidian tribe with native Iranians indicating bidirectional migration", Annals of Human Biology, 46 (2): 175–180, doi:10.1080/03014460.2019.1599067, PMID   30909755, S2CID   85516060
  18. ↑ Robbeets, M (2017) The language of the Transeurasian farmers. In Robbeets, M and Savelyev, A (eds), Language Dispersal Beyond Farming (pp. 93–116). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  19. ↑ Robbeets, M (2020) The Transeurasian homeland: where, what and when? In Robbeets, M, Hübler, N and Savelyev, A (eds), The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  20. ↑ Serafim, Leon A. (2008), "The uses of Ryukyuan in understanding Japanese language history", in Frellesvig, Bjarke; Whitman, John (eds.), Proto-Japanese: Issues and Prospects, John Benjamins, pp. 79–99, ISBN 978-90-272-4809-1.
  21. ↑ Vovin, Alexander (2017),“Origins of the Japanese Language”, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.277.
  22. ↑ Martine Irma Robbeets (2017): "Austronesian influence and Transeurasian ancestry in Japanese: A case of farming/language dispersal". Language Dynamics and Change, volume 7, issue 2, pages 201–251, doi : 10.1163/22105832-00702005
  23. ↑ De Boer, E., Yang, M., Kawagoe, A., & Barnes, G. (2020). Japan considered from the hypothesis of farmer/language spread. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2, E13. doi:10.1017/ehs.2020.7
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  25. ↑ Donohue, Mark; Denham, Tim (2010). "Farming and Language in Island Southeast Asia: Reframing Austronesian History". Current Anthropology. 51 (2): 223–256. doi:10.1086/650991. ISSN 0011-3204. JSTOR 10.1086/650991. S2CID 4815693.
  26. ↑ Bellwood, Peter (2006), "Asian Farming Diasporas? Agriculture, Languages, and Genes in China and Southeast Asia", Archaeology of Asia, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, pp. 96–118, doi:10.1002/9780470774670.ch6, ISBN 978-0-470-77467-0
  27. ↑ Laurent Sagart; Guillaume Jacques; Yunfan Lai; Robin J. Ryder; Valentin Thouzeau; Simon J. Greenhill; Johann-Mattis List (May 2019). "Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116 (21): 10317–10322. Bibcode:2019PNAS..11610317S. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1817972116 . PMC   6534992 . PMID   31061123.
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  29. ↑ Zhang, M.; Yan, S.; Pan, W. (24 April 2019). "Phylogenetic evidence for Sino-Tibetan origin in northern China in the Late Neolithic". Nature. 569 (2019): 112–115. Bibcode:2019Natur.569..112Z. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1153-z. PMID   31019300. S2CID   129946000 . Retrieved 16 May 2021.
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  31. ↑ Sidwell, Paul. 2021. Austroasiatic Dispersal: the AA "Water-World" Extended. SEALS 2021. (Video)
  32. ↑ Sidwell, Paul (2009). The Austroasiatic Central Riverine Hypothesis. Keynote address, SEALS, XIX.
  33. ↑ van Driem, George. (2011). Rice and the Austroasiatic and Hmong-Mien homelands. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Dynamics of Human Diversity: The Case of Mainland Southeast Asia (pp. 361-390). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
  34. ↑ Peiros, Ilia (2011). "Some thoughts on the problem of the Austro-Asiatic homeland" (PDF). Journal of Language Relationship. Retrieved 4 August 2019.
  35. ↑ Reconstructing Austroasiatic prehistory. In P. Sidwell & M. Jenny (Eds.), The Handbook of Austroasiatic Languages. Leiden: Brill. (Page 1: "Sagart (2011) and Bellwood (2013) favour the middle Yangzi"
  36. ↑ Zhang, Xiaoming; Liao, Shiyu; Qi, Xuebin; Liu, Jiewei; Kampuansai, Jatupol; Zhang, Hui; Yang, Zhaohui; Serey, Bun; Tuot, Sovannary (20 October 2015). Y-chromosome diversity suggests southern origin and Paleolithic backwave migration of Austro- Asiatic speakers from eastern Asia to the Indian subcontinent OPEN. 5.
  37. ↑ Blench, Roger. 2018. Waterworld: lexical evidence for aquatic subsistence strategies in Austroasiatic. In Papers from the Seventh International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics, 174-193. Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society Special Publication No. 3. University of Hawaiʻi Press.
  38. ↑ Sidwell, Paul. 2015. Phylogeny, innovations, and correlations in the prehistory of Austroasiatic. Paper presented at the workshop Integrating inferences about our past: new findings and current issues in the peopling of the Pacific and South East Asia, 22–23 June 2015, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany.
  39. ↑ Hill JH (2001) Proto-Uto-Aztecan: A community of cultivators in central Mexico? Am Anthropol 103:913–934.
  40. ↑ Renfrew C, McMahon AMS, Trask RLBellwood P (2000) in Time Depth in Historical Linguistics, The time depth of major language families: An archaeologist's perspective, eds Renfrew C, McMahon AMS, Trask RL (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, UK), 1, pp 109–140.
  41. ↑ Bellwood P, Renfrew CMatson RG (2002) in Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis, The spread of maize agriculture in the U.S. Southwest, eds Bellwood P, Renfrew C (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, UK), pp 331–340.
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