Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 October 16

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

October 16

Biomes and language phyla

What effect do biomes have on the diversity of language phyla within an area? Do rain-forests have more or fewer different phyla than tundras? Why is most of Europe Indo-European? Does the difficulty of traveling long distances across the sea have an effect on the dominance of Austronesian languages in Oceania? Confused Conlanger (talk) 11:22, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

This research article might interest you: "River density and landscape roughness are universal determinants of linguistic diversity" by Jacob Bock Axelsen and Susanna Manrubia, Proceedings of the Royal Society, B 2014 281, 20133029, published 16 April 2014. ---Sluzzelin talk 11:58, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

The interplay between biomes and language diversity is a complex one and it'll be difficult to draw generalisations. It's not always the case the difficult terrain would correlate with more language diversity. In Papua New Guinea for example, the lowlands in the north and in the south, and especially along the navigable Sepik and Fly rivers, are home to a large number of small language families and language isolates. The New Guinea Highlands on the other hand, despite their rugged terrain are dominated by languages from the single Trans-New Guinea family. How has that come about? The climate in the highlands has been more conducive to agriculture. When first discovered, it is an enormous force for change: agricultural societies have growing populations and a greater capacity for spreading out and dominating neighbouring by either conquest or by cultural influence. – Uanfala (talk) 23:01, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

I think (though it's been a while since I read it), that the incomparable Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond may deal with this a bit, or at least tangentially; the book is, after all, primarily about the effect of geography on human culture. --Jayron32 00:09, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

• Joanna Nichol's Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time is the go-to work on this. I must caution that I disagree with much of what she argues in that book, and elsewhere; yet the notion of a "spread zone" is a widely accepted one. The notion is contextual. Consider the Pacific Islands. Much of the area was quite remote. Mostly only areas that had been united by land bridges during earlier ice ages (or at least close enough to be seen as nearby areas for exploration) were settled at the time of the Austronesian expansion.

The Austronesians had a greatly superior nautical technology, and one group of Austronesians colonized the whole of the Filipines and most of Indonesia. From there they spread rapidly as far as Hawaii, Easter Island, New Zealand, and even Madagascar. In fact, Malagasy is so similar to its closest relative in Indonesia, we know their closest kin live in Borneo. The exception is New Guinea, where there are some Austronesian languages on the coasts. But the land is highly mountainous making travel arduous, and the 1000's of tribes there were used to repelling foreign invaders from experience fighting among themselves.

For the Austronesians, most of the Pacific was a spread-zone, given their technology and the largely similar physical ecology. The same notion applies the PIE expansion. Given their use of the newly invented technologies of horseback riding and the wagon, they were able to be highly mobile pasturalists, and the quickly moved west into the lowlands of Europe and Western Asia, except in remote upland areas where remnant ante-PIE populations like the Basques and the famously warlike tribes of the Caucasus Mountains (Called by Greeks, the Mountain of 100 languages) and so forth. Think of the plains of Western Eurasia as their Pacific Islands, and The Caucasus as their New Guinea Highlands.

The (relatively) rapid and recent spread of these language areas into "spread zones" of suitable human ecology and physical geography makes the internal relatedness of PIE and Austronesian easy to discern. One can see the same phenomena in the Americas, with European colonization almost complete, and indigenous survival in remote or "unattractive" areas the rule. In the Lower 48, only the Navajo tribe has over 100,000 speakers and its number is growing. There are other examples; not to slight ones I do not mention.

A final example might be Siberia. At the time of Columbus, there were well over a dozen highly diverse native phyla, such as the Chuckchi-Kamchatkans, the Nivkh, The Yukaghirs, The Yeniseians, various Uralic and Altaic groups, and so forth, many lost without a trace. In the last few centuries, The Yakut people, speakers of a Turkic tribe on horseback and with Western technology were able to dominate the area, and assimilate many peoples like the Yukaghir who speak a moribund, if not extinct language that was once part of a large family of hunter gatherers.

What was once a remote refugium, difficult to traverse and harsh to live in had become a spread-zone for the Yakut. And now, ironically, a spread-zone for the Russians in their place. μηδείς (talk) 03:07, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

• Does any of the literature referenced above deal with the fact that Chinese is a counterexample to the general trend that languages are more diverse at the center of dispersal and less so at the periphery? Basemetal 11:26, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

Nichols does not address this directly in the work mentioned. I'll have to read our articles to see what they say.

My understanding is that (1) the center of origin is still under debate (in some part due to linguistic nationalism) and (2) the expansion of Mandarin is recent, and may have wiped out more diverse congeners. In effect, Mandarin, which had the benefit of the introduction of horseback riding first, saw the North, West, and South West as a spread-zone, while the east/south-east was more mountainous and also more populous.

Consider the fact that most of the non-Chinese minority languages, whether Bai, Tibeto-Burman, Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, etc, are in the mountainous south, and not on the coasts of the major river systems. I do not read or speak any of these languages, and the topic is not my specialty, so hopefully others can comment. μηδείς (talk) 18:35, 17 October 2016 (UTC)