Language Dispersal Beyond Farming

Editors

Martine Robbeets

| Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena

Alexander Savelyev

| Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027212559 | EUR 95.00 | USD 143.00

e-Book – Open Access Download from our e-platform

ISBN 9789027264640

Why do some languages wither and die, while others prosper and spread? Around the turn of the millennium a number of archaeologists such as Colin Renfrew and Peter Bellwood made the controversial claim that many of the world’s major language families owe their dispersal to the adoption of agriculture by their early speakers. In this volume, their proposal is reassessed by linguists, investigating to what extent the economic dependence on plant cultivation really impacted language spread in various parts of the world. Special attention is paid to "tricky" language families such as Eskimo-Aleut, Quechua, Aymara, Bantu, Indo-European, Transeurasian, Turkic, Japano-Koreanic, Hmong-Mien and Trans-New Guinea, that cannot unequivocally be regarded as instances of Farming/Language Dispersal, even if subsistence played a role in their expansion.

[Not in series, 215] 2017. xiii, 324 pp.

Publishing status: Available

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

https://doi.org/10.1075/z.215

Table of Contents

List of tables	vii–viii
List of figures	ix–x
List of contributors	xi–xii
Acknowledgements	xiii
Chapter 1. Farming/Language Dispersal: Food for thought Martine Robbeets	1–23
Chapter 2. Proto-Quechua and Proto-Aymara agropastoral terms: Reconstruction and contact patterns Nicholas Q. Emlen and Willem F. H. Adelaar	25–45
Chapter 3. Subsistence terms in Unangam Tunuu (Aleut) Anna Berge	47–73
Chapter 4. Lexical recycling as a lens onto shared Japano-Koreanic agriculture Alexander Francis-Ratte	75–92
Chapter 5. The language of the Transeurasian farmers Martine Robbeets	93–121
Chapter 6. Farming-related terms in Proto-Turkic and Proto-Altaic Alexander Savelyev	123–154
Chapter 7. Farming and the Trans-New Guinea family: A consideration Antoinette Schapper	155–181
Chapter 8. The domestications and the domesticators of Asian rice George L. van Driem	183–214
Chapter 9. Macrofamilies and agricultural lexicon: Problems and perspectives George Starostin	215–233
Chapter 10. Were the first Bantu speakers south of the rainforest farmers? A first assessment of the linguistic evidence Koen Bostoen and Joseph Koni Muluwa	235–258
Chapter 11. Expanding the methodology of lexical examination in the investigation of the intersection of early agriculture and language dispersal Brian D. Joseph	259–274
Chapter 12. Agricultural terms in Indo-Iranian Martin Joachim Kümmel	275–290
Chapter 13. Milk and the Indo-Europeans Romain Garnier, Laurent Sagart and Benoît Sagot	291–311
Language index	313–319
Subject index	321–324

Cited by

Cited by 9 other publications

Bellwood, Peter

2019. In The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ► pp. 1 ff.

de Boer, Elisabeth, Melinda A. Yang, Aileen Kawagoe & Gina L. Barnes

2020. Japan considered from the hypothesis of farmer/language spread. Evolutionary Human Sciences 2

Hudson, Mark J

2019. Socio-ecological resilience and language dynamics: An adaptive cycle model of long-term language change. Journal of Language Evolution 4:1 ► pp. 19 ff.

Hudson, Mark J., Shigeki Nakagome & John B. Whitman

2020. The evolving Japanese: the dual structure hypothesis at 30. Evolutionary Human Sciences 2

Kim, Jangsuk & Jinho Park

2020. Millet vs rice: an evaluation of the farming/language dispersal hypothesis in the Korean context. Evolutionary Human Sciences 2

Mallory, J., A. Dybo & O. Balanovsky

2019. The Impact of Genetics Research on Archaeology and Linguistics in Eurasia. Russian Journal of Genetics 55:12 ► pp. 1472 ff.

Nelson, Sarah, Irina Zhushchikhovskaya, Tao Li, Mark Hudson & Martine Robbeets

2020. Tracing population movements in ancient East Asia through the linguistics and archaeology of textile production. Evolutionary Human Sciences 2

Ricquier, Birgit

2020. In The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, ► pp. 1 ff.

Uchiyama, Junzo, J. Christopher Gillam, Alexander Savelyev & Chao Ning

2020. Populations dynamics in Northern Eurasian forests: a long-term perspective from Northeast Asia. Evolutionary Human Sciences 2

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 december 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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