CHAPTER OUTLINE
Understanding the origin and diffusion of languages is essential to understanding the diffusion of humanity. By understanding where and how languages developed, we learn about the people who spoke them. Although there is disagreement on when language arose, there is no question that it was vital to the development of humanity. By studying the development and changes in languages we learn much about the development of humans and their cultures.
Language Origins
The search for the origins of language goes back tens of thousands of years. It has yielded information not only about how language changes but also about the environments where early languages were spoken. Linguistic reconstruction methods are still controversial, but with the help of computers, remarkable progress is being made in the reconstruction of ancient languages and their paths of diffusion.
The diversification of languages has long been charted through the analysis of sound shifts—finding similar words with the same meaning in different languages and determining their common language of origin. If it is possible to deduce a large part of the vocabulary of an extinct language, it may be possible to recreate the language that preceded it. This technique, called deep reconstruction, has yielded some important results. It takes humanity’s linguistic family tree back thousands of years.
Scientists do not yet agree on how long ago language emerged. Some believe that the use of language began with the rise of Homo sapiens 200,000 or more years ago; others argue that simple vocal communication began much earlier. The first major linguistic hypothesis proposed the existence of an ancestral Proto-Indo-European language (or closely related languages) as the predecessor of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, among other ancient languages. The proposed ancestral language(s) would link not only the romance language but also a number of other languages spoken from Britain to North Africa and South Asia .
The Language Tree
In the mid-nineteenth century August Schleicher, a German linguist, compared the world’s language families to the branches of a tree. He suggested that the basic process of language formation is language divergence—differentiation over time and space. Languages would branch into dialects; isolation then increased the differences between dialects. Over time, dialects would become discrete languages. Schleicher’s idea has stood the test of time and criticism, and the language-tree model remains central to language research (Figure 9-1).
A complicating factor is that with human mobility, languages did not merely diffuse through static populations; they also spread by relocation diffusion (see Chapter 2). If this caused long-isolated languages to make contact, language convergence occurred. Researchers then face special problems because the rules of reconstruction may or may not apply. Modern cultural events add a further complication. We know that the languages of traditional, numerically smaller, and technologically less advanced people have been replaced, or greatly modified, by the languages of invaders. This process of language replacement goes on today, and there is every reason to believe that it has happened ever since humans began to use language. Thus languages change through divergence, convergence, and replacement, making the spatial search for origins problematic.
Recent Language Diffusion
The final stages of the dispersal of the older languages—before the global diffusion of English and other Indo-European languages—occurred in the Pacific realm and in the Americas . One would thus assume that the historical geography of these events would be easier to reconstruct than the complex situation in western Eurasia , but this is not the ease. While the relatively recent spread of languages to these two realms does provide useful information for the reconstruction of language diffusion routes and processes, an examination of the debates over Pacific and American native languages reveals that the problems are not simple at all.
Much remains to be learned about the reasons behind the complexity of the Pacific language map, to say nothing about the debate over human migration to, and language development and diffusion in, the Americas . One theory holds that there were three ~waves” of early human migration to the Americas from Asia producing three families of indigenous American languages. A majority of linguists still doubt the three-wave hypothesis and the three-family map of American languages. Genetic research and archeological studies will ultimately solve the issue. In the meantime, we are reminded of the gaps still remaining in our knowledge.
Influences on Individual Languages
Each of the languages in the world’s language families has its own story of origin and dispersal. It is clear, however, that there are certain critical influences on the diffusion of individual tongues. First, speakers of non-written languages will not retain the same language very long if they lose contact with one another. Second, the diffusion of a single tongue over a large area occurs only when people remain in contact with one another and continue to rely on a common linguistic frame of reference. Three critical components therefore have influenced the world’s linguistic mosaic: writing, technology, and political organization.
