Description
Book SynopsisThis book addresses the complex question of how and why languages have spread across the globe: why do we find large language families distributed over a wide area in some regions, while elsewhere we find clusters of very small families or language isolates? What roles have agriculture, geography, climate, ethnic identity, and language ideologies played in language spread? In this volume, international experts in the field provide new answers to these and related questions, drawing on the increasingly large databases available and on novel analytical research techniques.The first part of the volume outlines some general issues and approaches in the study of language dispersal, diversification, and contact. In the rest of the volume, chapters compare the language and population histories of three major regions - Island Southeast Asia/Oceania, Africa, and South America - which show particularly interesting contrasts in the distribution of languages and language families. The volume is in
Table of Contents1: Mily Crevels and Pieter Muysken: Patterns of diversification and contact: Re-examining dispersal hypotheses Part I: General approaches 2: Johanna Nichols: Dispersal patterns shape areal typology 3: Peter Trudgill: Sociolinguistic typology and the uniformitarian hypothesis 4: Tom Güldemann and Harald Hammarström: Geographical axis effects in large-scale linguistic distributions 5: Balthasar Bickel: Large and ancient linguistic areas Part II: Southeast Asia and Oceania 6: Marian Klamer, Mily Crevels, and Pieter Muysken: Patterns of dispersal and diversification in Island Southeast Asia and Oceania 7: Nicholas Evans: Time, diversification, and dispersal on the Australian continent: Three enigmas of linguistic prehistory 8: William A. Foley: Language diversity, geomorphological change, and population movements in the Sepik-Ramu basin of Papua New Guinea 9: Jean-Christophe Galipaud: The dynamics of human expansion and cultural diversification in Southeast Asia and Oceania during the Neolithic: An archaeological perspective 10: Mark Donohue and Tim Denham: The role of contact and language shift in the spread of Austronesian languages across Island Southeast Asia Part III: Africa 11: Gerrit J. Dimmendaal, Mily Crevels, and Pieter Muysken: Patterns of dispersal and diversification in Africa 12: Gerrit J. Dimmendaal: Language diversification and contact in Africa 13: Koen Bostoen: The Bantu expansion: Some facts and fiction 14: Maarten Mous: Language isolates and the spread of pastoralism in East Africa Part IV: South America 15: Pieter Muysken and Mily Crevels: Patterns of dispersal and diversification in South America 16: Patience Epps: Amazonian linguistic diversity and its sociocultural correlates 17: Robert S. Walker: Cultural phylogenetics in lowland South America
