Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time
Encyclopedia
Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time (University of Chicago Press
, 1992) is linguist
Johanna Nichols
's best known work, pioneering the use of linguistic typology
as a tool for understanding human migrations in prehistory
.
Nichols selects a sample of the world's languages (one per stock
) and tabulates typological characteristics such as:
for each language, using this data to discover regional patterns in the distribution of these features.
One pattern is spread zones (geographical areas where a language family has spread widely, often repeated with several language families in sequence, like Indo-European
and later Turkic languages
in central Eurasia
) vs. residual zones (areas, often mountainous, where many languages of various families have been preserved, like the Caucasus
or New Guinea
). For example, head marking is more common in the residual zones, which Nichols suggests is a result of long-term language contact.
At the broadest level, Nichols divides the world of languages into three large regions:
The Old World is geographically largest, but has the least typological diversity and lowest density of language families, suggesting that repeated spreads from its center have eliminated much diversity which previously existed, especially at the edges of the Africa-Eurasia supercontinent. Surprisingly, typological statistics for African languages
are similar to those for the languages of Eurasia
, though there has been little spread of languages between the two areas, other than the Afro-Asiatic languages
that span both areas.
The New World differs considerably from the Old World, with much higher frequencies of head-marking, ergativity and other features. The "Pacific" is intermediate on these features. One interpretation is that these patterns resulted from chance; another is that the New World was colonized from a Pacific region which was formerly larger and included unknown archaic languages of coastal East Asia
. Based on the latter interpretation, Nichols suggests a relatively early date (pre-Clovis
) for the initial peopling of the Americas.
Nichols also suggests that change over time in head-marking languages tends to destroy the information needed for the comparative method
of reconstructing a protolanguage that is the ancestor to a number of known languages, while dependent-marking languages are more likely to preserve it over time. This would help account for the large number of still-independent language families in the Americas and Australasia
, in contrast to the large families of considerable time depth that have been reconstructed in Eurasia and Africa.
University of Chicago Press
The University of Chicago Press is the largest university press in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including The Chicago Manual of Style, dozens of academic journals, including Critical Inquiry, and a wide array of...
, 1992) is linguist
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
Johanna Nichols
Johanna Nichols
Linguist Johanna Nichols is a professor emerita on active duty in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include the Slavic languages, the linguistic prehistory of northern Eurasia, language typology, ancient linguistic...
's best known work, pioneering the use of linguistic typology
Linguistic typology
Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties and the structural diversity of the world's languages...
as a tool for understanding human migrations in prehistory
Prehistory
Prehistory is the span of time before recorded history. Prehistory can refer to the period of human existence before the availability of those written records with which recorded history begins. More broadly, it refers to all the time preceding human existence and the invention of writing...
.
Nichols selects a sample of the world's languages (one per stock
Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...
) and tabulates typological characteristics such as:
- Head-marking vs. dependent-marking
- MorphologicalMorphology (linguistics)In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
complexity - Word orderWord orderIn linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic subdomains are also of interest...
- Morphosyntactic alignmentMorphosyntactic alignmentIn linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the system used to distinguish between the arguments of transitive verbs and those of intransitive verbs...
- ValenceValency (linguistics)In linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the number of arguments controlled by a verbal predicate. It is related, though not identical, to verb transitivity, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate...
-changing operations or voice system - Presence or absence of distinction between inclusive and exclusive weClusivityIn linguistics, clusivity is a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we"...
- Presence or absence of distinction between inalienable possessionInalienable possessionIn linguistics, inalienable possession refers to the linguistic properties of certain nouns or nominal morphemes based on the fact that they are always possessed. The semantic underpinning is that entities like body parts and relatives do not exist apart from a possessor. For example, a hand...
and alienable possession - Presence or absence of numerical classifiers
- Presence or absence of noun classNoun classIn linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, but counting a given noun among nouns of such or another class is often clearly conventional...
es (such as grammatical genderGrammatical genderGrammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
or animacyAnimacyAnimacy is a grammatical and/or semantic category of nouns based on how sentient or alive the referent of the noun in a given taxonomic scheme is...
) - Presence or absence of grammatical numberGrammatical numberIn linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
("plurality neutralization" is Nichols's term for absence) - Presence or absence of adpositional phrases ("PP's" in the book, for prepositional or postpositional phrases)
- Presence or absence of non-finite verbNon-finite verbIn linguistics, a non-finite verb is a verb form that is not limited by a subject and, more generally, is not fully inflected by categories that are marked inflectionally in language, such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender, and person...
s (infinitiveInfinitiveIn grammar, infinitive is the name for certain verb forms that exist in many languages. In the usual description of English, the infinitive of a verb is its basic form with or without the particle to: therefore, do and to do, be and to be, and so on are infinitives...
s or verbal nounVerbal nounIn linguistics, the verbal noun turns a verb into a noun and corresponds to the infinitive in English language usage. In English the infinitive form of the verb is formed when preceded by to, e.g...
s)
for each language, using this data to discover regional patterns in the distribution of these features.
One pattern is spread zones (geographical areas where a language family has spread widely, often repeated with several language families in sequence, like Indo-European
Indo-European
Indo-European may refer to:* Indo-European languages** Aryan race, a 19th century and early 20th century term for those peoples who are the native speakers of Indo-European languages...
and later Turkic languages
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
in central Eurasia
Eurasia
Eurasia is a continent or supercontinent comprising the traditional continents of Europe and Asia ; covering about 52,990,000 km2 or about 10.6% of the Earth's surface located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres...
) vs. residual zones (areas, often mountainous, where many languages of various families have been preserved, like the Caucasus
Caucasus
The Caucasus, also Caucas or Caucasia , is a geopolitical region at the border of Europe and Asia, and situated between the Black and the Caspian sea...
or New Guinea
New Guinea
New Guinea is the world's second largest island, after Greenland, covering a land area of 786,000 km2. Located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, it lies geographically to the east of the Malay Archipelago, with which it is sometimes included as part of a greater Indo-Australian Archipelago...
). For example, head marking is more common in the residual zones, which Nichols suggests is a result of long-term language contact.
At the broadest level, Nichols divides the world of languages into three large regions:
- Old WorldOld WorldThe Old World consists of those parts of the world known to classical antiquity and the European Middle Ages. It is used in the context of, and contrast with, the "New World" ....
- New WorldNew WorldThe New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America and sometimes Oceania . The term originated in the late 15th century, when America had been recently discovered by European explorers, expanding the geographical horizon of the people of the European middle...
(Indigenous languages of the AmericasIndigenous languages of the AmericasIndigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language...
) - "'Pacific" (Australian languages and Papuan languagesPapuan languagesThe Papuan languages are those languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. The term does not presuppose a genetic relationship. The concept of Papuan peoples as distinct from Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892.-The...
)
The Old World is geographically largest, but has the least typological diversity and lowest density of language families, suggesting that repeated spreads from its center have eliminated much diversity which previously existed, especially at the edges of the Africa-Eurasia supercontinent. Surprisingly, typological statistics for African languages
African languages
There are over 2100 and by some counts over 3000 languages spoken natively in Africa in several major language families:*Afro-Asiatic spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel...
are similar to those for the languages of Eurasia
Eurasia
Eurasia is a continent or supercontinent comprising the traditional continents of Europe and Asia ; covering about 52,990,000 km2 or about 10.6% of the Earth's surface located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres...
, though there has been little spread of languages between the two areas, other than the Afro-Asiatic languages
Afro-Asiatic languages
The Afroasiatic languages , also known as Hamito-Semitic, constitute one of the world's largest language families, with about 375 living languages...
that span both areas.
The New World differs considerably from the Old World, with much higher frequencies of head-marking, ergativity and other features. The "Pacific" is intermediate on these features. One interpretation is that these patterns resulted from chance; another is that the New World was colonized from a Pacific region which was formerly larger and included unknown archaic languages of coastal East Asia
East Asia
East Asia or Eastern Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms...
. Based on the latter interpretation, Nichols suggests a relatively early date (pre-Clovis
Clovis culture
The Clovis culture is a prehistoric Paleo-Indian culture that first appears 11,500 RCYBP , at the end of the last glacial period, characterized by the manufacture of "Clovis points" and distinctive bone and ivory tools...
) for the initial peopling of the Americas.
Nichols also suggests that change over time in head-marking languages tends to destroy the information needed for the comparative method
Comparative method
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...
of reconstructing a protolanguage that is the ancestor to a number of known languages, while dependent-marking languages are more likely to preserve it over time. This would help account for the large number of still-independent language families in the Americas and Australasia
Australasia
Australasia is a region of Oceania comprising Australia, New Zealand, the island of New Guinea, and neighbouring islands in the Pacific Ocean. The term was coined by Charles de Brosses in Histoire des navigations aux terres australes...
, in contrast to the large families of considerable time depth that have been reconstructed in Eurasia and Africa.