Molecular anthropology as a window on language contact: diffusion probabilities in phonology and grammar

This text was first published in the “Book of Abstracts” of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, 10 – 13 September 2017, University of Zurich, Switzerland. The map above depicts the distribution of admixed language pairs in the sample (source: B Bickel).

Theories on diffusion or borrowability probabilities tend to be based on case studies of language contact where much of linguistic and social history is known or reconstructable [1] [2] [3]. This incurs either a bias towards shallow time depths, or a strong reliance on individual reconstructions of hand- picked features, with little quantification of uncertainty.

Here we examine contact events known from molecular anthropology and estimate diffusion probabilities by sampling features in large-scale typological databases across all domains of linguistic structure [4] [5] [6] [7].

Molecular anthropology has traced physical contact (admixture) events in the past few thousand years, across several areas in the world. These events are a sufficient (though not a necessary) condition for language contact. We sample cases of two-way contact events from the genetic literature [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13], for which we were able to identify languages that the populations are most probably associated with. We measure similarities between the two languages with regard to the typological features in our databases. Where several languages are likely to be associated with the same genetic population, we resample from the candidates. Finally, we compare the observed similarities to baseline expectations from similarities between languages that are extremely unlikely to ever have been in contact (as ensured by maximizing their geographical distance), while controlling for global frequencies (since more frequent features increase the expected similarities).

Our results suggest that within the time depth of our sample (ca. 500-5000 years) phonological features have diffused more than grammatical features. A likely explanation is that phonological features (a) can be carried by lexical borrowing, which is frequent anyway [3] [14] [15] [16], and (b) is a privileged marker for social accommodation and the signaling of alliances [17] [18].

Our results furthermore suggest that when grammatical features form significant geographical clusters, these are likely to reflect older and longer contact histories than geographical clusters in phonology. This opens up new avenues for pushing back the time barrier in reconstructing linguistic history.

References

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Affiliations

Balthasar Bickel (University of Zurich), Damian Blasi (University of Zurich and Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History), Steven Moran (University of Zurich), & Brigitte Pakendorf (CNRS UMR5596 Dynamique du Langage, Lyon and University of Lyon)