A full-scale test of the language farming dispersal hypothesis

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20345083
AutoresHarald Hammarström (0000-0003-0120-6396, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, autor de correspondencia)
Año2010
Volumen27
Número2
Páginas197-213
Fecha de publicación2010-10-19
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaDiachronica (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0176-4225 • E-ISSN: 1569-9714
EditorialJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/dia.27.2.02ham
OpenAlexW2079456674
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas10
Referencias citadas9

One attempt at explaining why some language families are large (while others are small) is the hypothesis that the families that are now large became large because their ancestral speakers had a technological advantage, most often agriculture. Variants of this idea are referred to as the Language Farming Dispersal Hypothesis. Previously, detailed language family studies have uncovered various supporting examples and counterexamples to this idea. In the present paper I weigh the evidence from ALL attested language families. For each family, I use the number of member languages as a measure of cardinal size, member language coordinates to measure geospatial size and ethnographic evidence to assess subsistence status. This data shows that, although agricultural families tend to be larger in cardinal size, their size is hardly due to the simple presence of farming. If farming were responsible for language family expansions, we would expect a greater east-west geospatial spread of large families than is actually observed. The data, however, is compatible with weaker versions of the farming dispersal hypothesis as well with models where large families acquire farming because of their size, rather than the other way around

Agriculture · Archaeology · Biological dispersal · Biology · Cartography · Geography · Geospatial analysis · Language family · Linguistics · Sociology · Subsistence agriculture · Demography · Language and cultural evolution · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Ecology