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The spread of language around the pacific rim
Author(s) -
Nichols Johanna
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
evolutionary anthropology: issues, news, and reviews
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.401
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1520-6505
pISSN - 1060-1538
DOI - 10.1002/evan.1360030607
Subject(s) - colonization , prehistory , history , linguistics , chronology , trace (psycholinguistics) , geography , tracing , genealogy , archaeology , computer science , philosophy , operating system
The spread of humans around the Pacific rim, ultimately to colonize the Pacific and the New World, began about 50,000 years ago. The languages of Australasia and the New World are a reservoir of potential clues to the chronology, origins, and process of human colonization, and linguists are seeking methods to tap this reservoir. Standard linguistic comparative‐historical method is unable to reach back in time more than about 8,000 years because regular grammar change and vocabulary loss gradually remove its most important evidence. The oldest well‐established and reconstructable language families are about 6,000 years old. Therefore, tracing those families ever farther back in time is not a possible way of recovering deep linguistic prehistory. Rather, it is the very discretness of the nearly 300 distinct language families on earth that makes it possible to define populations, map the distribution of diagnostic structural features in language, and thereby trace the spread of languages and colonization around the Pacific rim to their origins in the upper Paleolithic.