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Urheimat
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Contents
1 Language families predominantly found in Europe, North Asia and South Asia
1.1 Indo-European homelands
1.2 Dravidian homeland
1.3 Uralic homeland
1.4 Turkic homeland
1.5 Yeniseian
1.6 Other groups
2 Language families predominantly found in Africa and Southwest Asia
2.1 Khoisan homeland
2.2 Afro-Asiatic homeland
2.3 Nilo-Saharan homeland
2.4 NigerCongo homeland
2.5 Malagasy language homeland
3 Language families predominantly found in East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania
3.1 Sino-Tibetan homeland
3.2 Austroasiatic homeland
3.3 HmongMien homeland
3.4 Austronesian homeland
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Proto-Italic homeland
Candidates for the first introduction of Proto-Italic speakers to Italy are the Terramare culture (1500 BC) or
the Villanovan culture (1100 BC), although the latter is now usually identified with the non-Italic (indeed,
non-Indo-European) Etruscan civilisation.
The Romance languages are all derivative of Latin, a member of this Indo-European language subfamily,
which was the common language of the Western Roman Empire that had its roots in Italic dialect spoken in
and around the capital, Rome, until the empire collapsed in the 5th century CE.
Proto-Celtic homeland
The Proto-Celtic homeland is usually located in the Early Iron Age Hallstatt culture of northern Austria.
There is a broad consensus that the center of the La Tne culture lay on the northwest edges of the Hallstatt
culture. Pre-La Tne (6th to 5th century BC) Celtic expansions reached Great Britain and Ireland (Insular
Celtic) and Gaul. La Tne groups expanded in the 4th century BC to Iberia, the Po Valley, the Balkans, and
even as far as Galatia in Asia Minor, in the course of several major migrations.
Albanian homeland
The history of the Daco-Thracian/Thraco-Illyrian dialects of the Balkans is obscure, in part, because the
written record of these languages is fragmentary. One of these languages may have been the language that
evolved into the modern Albanian language.
Proto-Germanic homeland
Pre-Germanic cultures were the bearers of the Nordic Bronze Age. Proto-Germanic proper is hypothesized
by some to have developed in the Jastorf culture of the Pre-Roman Iron Age.[4]
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Proto-Greek homeland
The Phrygian, Macedonian, and Greek proto-languages likely also
originate in the Balkans.
Armenian homeland
Proto-Armenian may also be Balkans (Greco-Phrygian) derived, or at
least strongly influenced by a Phrygian substrate. The Phrygian
influence on [pre-]Proto-Armenian would date to about the 7th century
BC, in the context of the declining kingdom of Urartu.
Map of the Nordic Bronze Age
culture, c. 1200 BC
Proto-Balto-Slavic homeland
The Balto-Slavic homeland largely corresponds to the
historical distribution of Baltic and Slavic.
Proto-Baltic homeland
The Slavic homeland likely corresponds to the distribution of the oldest recognisably Slavic hydronyms,
found in northern and western Ukraine and southern Belarus.
Proto-Indo-Iranian homeland
The Proto-Indo-Iranians are widely identified with the bearers of the Andronovo horizon of the late 3rd and
early 2nd millennia BC, with the various languages of the Indo-Iranian language family starting to
differentiate from Proto-Indo-Iranian around 2000 BCE.
There are three language families within the Indo-Iranian language family that derived from the ProtoIndo-Iranian language: the Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and other Indo-European
languages of South Asia; the Iranian languages, e.g. Persian, Kurdish and Pashto of West Asia and Central
Asia; and the Nuristani languages spoken in eastern Afghanistan.
The Indo-Aryan languages are all descendants of the Sanskrit language, which it at least as old as 1500 BCE,
where Indo-Aryan linguistic features were historically attested by the Hittites in the Mittani language of
Western Iran, and was a single Old Aryan language as recently as the 4th century BCE, when it was
standardized in written form. Some scholars associate the Cemetery H culture of the Northern Indus River
Valley (specifically Western Punjab) ca. 1900 BCE with the original Indo-Aryan population of South Asia.
The community that originally spoke the Sanskrit language is also called the Vedic civiliation after their
semi-legendary account of their community found in Hindu scriptures called the Vedas during the Vedic
period from ca. 1700 BCE to ca. 320 BCE. The archaeological cultures in South Asia described as Black and
Red Ware (10th century BCE) and the later Painted Gray Ware (starting ca. 900 BCE) and subsequently the
Northern Black Polished Ware (ca. 500 BCE) are all commonly associated with the Sanskrit language
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Dravidian homeland
The Dravidian languages have been found mainly in South India
since at least the second century BCE (inscriptions, ed. I. Mahadevan
2003). It is, however, a widely held hypothesis that Dravidian
speakers may have been more widespread throughout India,
including the northwest region,[5] before the arrival of
Indo-European speakers. A map showing where Dravidian languages
are spoken today appears to the right.
Historical records suggest that the South Dravidian language group
had separated from a Proto-Dravidian language no later than 700
BCE, linguistic evidence suggests that they probably became
distinctive around 1,100 BCE,[6] and some scholars using linguistic
methods put the deepest divisions in the language group at roughly
3,000 BCE. Russian linguist M.S. Andronov puts the split between
Tamil (a written Southern Dravidian language) and Telugu (a written
Central Dravidian language) between 1,500 BCE and 1,000 BCE.[7]
Southworth identifies late Proto-Dravidian with the Southern Neolithic culture in the lower Godavari River
basin of South Central India, which first appeared ca. 2,500 BCE, based upon its agricultural vocabulary,
while noting that this "would not preclude the possibility that speakers of an earlier stage of Dravidian
entered the subcontinent from western or central Asia, as has often been suggested."[8]
Speculations regarding the original homeland have centered on the Indus Valley Civilization or on Elam
(whose Elamite language was spoken in the hills to the east of the ancient Sumerian civilization with whom
the Indus Valley Civilization traded and shared domesticated species) in an Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis, but
results have not been convincing. The possibility that the language family is indigenous to the Dravidian area
and is a truly isolated genetic unit has also not been ruled out.
Prof. Asko Parpola (University of Helsinki), the Jesuit priest Father Heras in the 1930s and other scholars
(such as Indian and early Tamil expert Iravatham Mahadevan and Prof. Walter A. Fairservis Jr.) conclude
that the Indus sign system represented an ancient Dravidian language, a view that they assume is supported
by Tamil artifacts discovered in 2006.[9] Thus, in Parpola's view, the urheimat of Dravidian would be in the
Indus River Valley. However, Harvard Indologist Michael Witzel takes the viewthat has received serious
academic consideration (ca. 2004)which is critical of an Indus Valley Civilization Dravidian homeland and
of the widely held view that the inscriptions of the Indus Valley Civilization even constitute a written
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language.[10] In the essay "Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan" (with RV in this context referring to
Rigvedic, i.e. Indo-Aryan), Witzel says "As we can no longer reckon with Dravidian influence on the early
RV, this means that the language of the pre-Rigvedic Indus civilization, at least in the Panjab, was of (Para-)
Austroasiatic nature." There are no written examples of Austroasiatic languages being spoken further west
than Central India during the recent historical era (i.e., in the era for which we have written records).
Recent studies of the distribution of alleles on the Y chromosome,[11] microsatellite DNA,[12] and
mitochondrial DNA[13] in India have cast doubt for a biological Dravidian "race" distinct from
non-Dravidians in the Indian subcontinent;[14] other recent genetic studies have found evidence of Aryan,
Dravidian and pre-Dravidian (original Asian) strata in South Asian populations.[15] Geneticist Luigi Luca
Cavalli-Sforza proposes that a Dravidian people were preceded in India by Austroasiatic people, and were
present prior to the arrival of Indo-Aryan language speakers in India.[16]
Uralic homeland
The Uralic homeland is unknown. A
possible locus is the Comb Ceramic
Culture of ca 4200 ca 2000 BC (shown
on the map to the right). This is
suggested by the high language diversity
around the middle Volga River, where
three highly distinct branches of the
Uralic family, Mordvinic, Mari, and
Permic, are located. Reconstructed plant
and animal names (including spruce,
Siberian pine, Siberian Fir, Siberian larch,
brittle willow, elm, and hedgehog) are
consistent with this location. This is
adjacent to the proposed homeland for
Proto-Indo-European under the Kurgan
hypothesis.
French anthropologist Bernard Sergent,
in La Gense de l'Inde (1997),[17] argued
Neolithic period
that Finno-Ugric (Uralic) may have a
genetic source or have borrowed
significantly from proto-Dravidian or a predecessor language of West African origins. Some linguists see
Uralic (Hungarian, Finnish) as having a linguistic relationship to both Altaic (Turkic, Mongol) language
groups[18] (as in the outdated Ural-Altaic hypothesis) and Dravidian languages. The theory that the
Dravidian languages display similarities with the Uralic language group, suggesting a prolonged period of
contact in the past,[19] is popular amongst Dravidian linguists and has been supported by a number of
scholars, including Robert Caldwell,[20] Thomas Burrow,[21] Kamil Zvelebil,[22] and Mikhail Andronov.[23]
This theory has, however, been rejected by some specialists in Uralic languages,[24] and has in recent times
also been criticised by other Dravidian linguists like the late Bhadriraju Krishnamurti.[25]
As noted below, many notable linguists have proposed that the Eskimo-Aleut languages and Uralic languages
have a common origin, although there is no consensus that this connection is genuine.
Turkic homeland
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Yeniseian
The Yeniseian language family has been recently tied by linguist Edward Vajda to the Native American
Na-Dene languages of North American (e.g. Navajo),[29] in a proposal named Dene-Yeniseian. Several
well-known linguists have reviewed the hypothesis as favorable, although several linguists, such as Lyle
Campbell, still reject it. This family of languages is sometimes described as Paleosiberian, a classification
that rests on a belief that it represents a stratum of Siberian populations that preceded the speakers of the
other modern languages of Siberia (mostly of the Indo-European and Altaic language families), possibly one
that dates back to the Paleolithic era when North America was initially populated. However, Paleosiberian
is usually considered a negatively defined collective term of convenience, not a genetic nor even areal
grouping, similarly to Papuan. There is some evidence that the speakers of the Yeniseian languages (such as
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the Ket language, which is the only surviving member of the moribund language family) migrated to their
current homeland along the Yenisei River in Central Siberia from an area south of the Altai Mountains in the
general vicinity of Mongolia or Northwest China within the last 2500 years or so (although there is no
evidence that the Yeniseian languages are linguistically related to the Altaic languages).[30][31][32] One
sentence of the language of the Jie, a Xiongnu tribe who founded the Later Zhao state in Chinese history,
appears consistent with being a Yeniseian language. Other linguists have suggested, with far less widespread
acceptance in the linguistics community, that the Yeniseian languages have a genetic relationship to one or
more of the Caucasian languages and the Sino-Tibetan languages (such as Chinese).[33][34]
Other groups
The only languages which are predominantly found in Europe, North Asia and South Asia and are not part of
the language families above are the Basque language spoken in Northern Spain and Southwestern France,
the three living language families of the Caucasus mountains (Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasian
and South Caucasian, with the first two sometimes proposed as members of a single North Caucasian
language family), the Paleosiberian languages (the Yukaghir languages of Central Siberia (viewed by some
linguists as a divergent branch of the Uralic languages),[35][36] and the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages of
Eastern Siberia, a grouping which sometimes includes the geographically adjacent Nivkh language, although
it is sometimes treated as a language isolate, and Yenesian), and a few South Asian linguistic isolates, such as
Burushaski, spoken mostly in isolated pockets of Northern Pakistan, and the two indigenous language
families of the Andamanese people (Great Andamanese and Ongan), and perhaps Nihali (spoken in West
Central India).[37] In each of these cases, the languages are spoken in an area that is geographically compact,
were spoken in that area at the time that they were first attested historically, and there is no definitive
evidence of an origin for the languages in question outside the area where they are spoken now.
Joseph Greenberg and Stephen Wurm have both noted lexical similarities between the Great Andamanese
language and the West Papuan languages. Wurm noted that the lexical similarities "are quite striking and
amount to virtual formal identity [...] in a number of instances." There is no agreement, even between these
two linguists, on a narrative that gave rise to these similarities.
Michael Fortescue, a specialist in EskimoAleut as well as in Chukotko-Kamchatkan, argues for a link
between Uralic, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, and EskimoAleut in Language Relations Across Bering
Strait (1998). He calls this proposed grouping Uralo-Siberian.
There have been determined efforts by multiple linguists from at least the 19th century to link these
languages to other language families, particularly in the case of the Basque language, where numerous
connections to language families living and dead have been proposed by linguists. Frequently, efforts to look
for deeper linguistic origins of these languages will also attempt to integrate them into attested extinct
languages of Europe, such as the Etruscan language of Northern Italy, the Ligurian language of Italy, the
Lemnian language of the Aegean Island of Lemnos, the Minoan language aka Linear A of ancient Crete, the
Sumerian language once spoken in Mesopotamia (which is the oldest attested written language), the language
of the Indus River Valley civilization, the Elamite language of Iran, and the Hurrian language and Hattic
language of Anatolia. None of these efforts has achieved wide support among linguists, although some have
been viewed as sufficiently credible to receive serious consideration from multiple linguists.[37][38][39][40]
[41][42]
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Khoisan homeland
The Khoisan click languages of Africa do not form a
language family and so do not, as a family, have a
homeland. However, limited genetic evidence from some
Khoisan-language speakers in southern Africa suggest an
origin "along the African rift and a possible wider East
African range."[43] Thus, the Bushmen of the Kalahari
who occupy the largest geographic region where click
languages are spoken are viewed as a relict population
far removed from the place where click languages
probably originated. The Khoe languages, Tuu
languages, Kx'a languages, Hadza language and Sandawe
language (the latter two being Tanzanian language
isolates) are frequently grouped together in the catch all
Khoisan categorization, despite the lack of a definitive
recent common origin of these languages in a common
language family. However, for the Khoe-Kwadi group, a
more recent origin by immigration from East Africa
(around the beginning of the Christian Era) has been
suggested by Tom Gldemann, based on his observation
of similarities with Sandawe.
Afro-Asiatic homeland
The Afro-Asiatic languages include Arabic, Hebrew, Berber, and a variety of other languages now found
mostly in Northeast Africa, although the exact boundaries of this language family are disputed in the case of
a small number of languages spoken by small numbers of individuals in a few localized areas of Sudan and
East Africa.
The limited area of the Afro-Asiatic Sprachraum (prior to its expansion to new areas in the historic era) has
limited the potential areas where that family's Urheimat could be. Generally speaking, two proposals have
been developed: that Afro-Asiatic arose in a Semitic Urheimat in the Middle East aka Southwest Asia, or
that Afro-Asiatic languages arose in northeast Africa (generally, either between Darfur and Tibesti or in
Ethiopia and the other countries of the Horn of Africa). The African hypothesis is considered to be rather
more likely at the present time, because of the greater diversity of languages with more distant relationships
to each other there.
There have been serious linguistic proponents of almost every conceivable possible set of relationships of the
Afro-Asiatic language subfamilies to each other, although there is reasonably great consensus concerning the
subfamily classification of all but a few of the Afro-Asiatic languages. Some of this difficulty in resolving the
Afro-Asiatic family tree flows from the time depth of these languages. The Afro-Asiatic Egyptian language
of ancient Egypt (whose latest stage is known as Coptic) is one of the two oldest written language on Earth
(the other being the Sumerian language, a language isolate) dating in written form to approximately 3000
BCE, and the Semitic Akkadian language was also attested in writing from a very early date (ca. 2000 BCE).
A common Afro-Asiatic proto-language is necessarily older than these very old written languages which
belonged to language families that had already diverged from each other considerably by that point. There is
also no one genetic profile that is uniform among Afro-Asiatic language speakers that clearly unites them.
There are also competing theories on whether the Afro-Asiatic language family owes its expansion to the
Neolithic revolution that originated in an area that includes the range of the Afro-Asiatic language, or was
already widespread in the Upper Paleolithic era. Notably, the Afro-Asiatic language family is spoken in most
of the places that are leading candidates for the origins of the modern human species and most of
intermediate species between modern humans and the Great Apes in human evolution.
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Semitic homeland
There has been speculation regarding the specific Semitic subfamily of Afro-Asiatic languages, again with
the Horn of Africa and Southwest Asiaspecifically the Levantbeing the most common proposals. The
large number of Semitic languages present in the Horn of Africa seems at first glance to support the
hypothesis that the Semitic homeland lies there. However, the Semitic languages in the Horn of Africa all
belong to the South Semitic subfamily and appear to all have relatively recent common origins in a single
Ethio-Semitic proto-language, while the East and Central Semitic languages are native solely to Asia. These
features, and the presence of certain common Semitic lexical items in all Ethio-Semitic languages referring to
items that arrived in Africa from the Levant at a time after Semitic languages were known to have been
spoken in the Levant, have lent weight to the Levantine proposal.
Hebrew is found in Europe due to the Jewish diaspora after the fall of the Second Temple in 70 CE that
marked the beginning of Rabbinic Judaism. It is relatively closely related to the Arabic language even within
the Semitic language family, being part of the same Central Semitic group.
The Maltese language, the only other Semitic language of Europe, is a derivative of the Arabic language as it
was spoken in Sicily starting sometime after the rise of the Islamic empire in North Africa.
Nilo-Saharan homeland
Genetic studies of Nilo-Saharan-speaking populations are in general agreement with archaeological evidence
and linguistic studies that argue for a Nilo-Saharan homeland in eastern Sudan before 6000 BCE, with
subsequent migration events northward to the eastern Sahara, westward to the Chad Basin, and
southeastward into Kenya and Tanzania.[44]
Linguist Roger Blench has suggested that the Nilo-Saharan languages and the NigerCongo languages may
be branches of the same macrolanguage family.[45][46] Earlier proposals along this line were made by
linguist Edgar Gregersen in 1972.[47] These proposals have not reached a linguistic consensus, however, and
this connection presupposes that all of the Nilo-Saharan languages are actually related in a single family,
which has not been definitively established.
Razib Khan, based on analysis of the autosomal genetics of the Tutsi ethnic group of Africa, suggests that
"the Tutsi were in all likelihood once a Nilotic speaking population, who switched to the language of the
Bantus amongst whom they settled."[48][49]
NigerCongo homeland
The homeland of the NigerCongo languages, which has as its subfamily the BenueCongo languages, which
in turn includes the Bantu languages, is not known in time or place, beyond the fact that it probably
originated in or near the area where these languages were spoken prior to Bantu expansion (i.e. West Africa
or Central Africa) and probably predated the Bantu expansion of ca. 3000 BCE by many thousands of
years.[50] Its expansion may have been associated with the expansion of Sahel agriculture in the African
Neolithic period.[50]
According to linguist Roger Blench, as of 2004, all specialists in NigerCongo languages believe the
languages to have a common origin, rather than merely constituting a typological classification, for reasons
including their shared noun-class system, their shared verbal extensions and their shared basic lexicon.
[51][52]
Similar classifications have been made ever since Diedrich Westermann in 1922.[53] Joseph
Greenberg continued that tradition making it the starting point for modern linguistic classification in Africa,
with some of his most notable publications going to press starting in the 1960s.[54] But, there has been active
debate for many decades over the appropriate subclassifications of the languages in that language family,
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which is a key tool used in localizing a language's place of origin.[51] No definitive "Proto-NigerCongo"
lexicon or grammar has been developed for the language family as a whole.
An important unresolved issue in determining the time and place where the NigerCongo languages
originated and their range prior to recorded history is this language family's relationship to the Kordofanian
languages now spoken in the Nuba mountains of Sudan, which is not contiguous with the remainder of the
NigerCongo language speaking region and is at the northeasternmost extent of the current NigerCongo
linguistic region. The current prevailing linguistic view is that Kordofanian languages are part of the
NigerCongo language family, and that among the many languages still surviving in that region these may be
the oldest.[55] The evidence is insufficient to determine if this outlier group of NigerCongo language
speakers represent a prehistoric range of a NigerCongo linguistic region that has since contracted as other
languages have intruded, or if instead, this represents a group of NigerCongo language speakers who
migrated to the area at some point in prehistory where they were an isolated linguistic community from the
beginning.
The prehistoric range for the NigerCongo languages has implications, not just for the history of the
NigerCongo languages, but for the origins of the Afro-Asiatic languages and Nilo-Saharan languages whose
homelands have been hypothesized by some to overlap with the NigerCongo linguistic range prior to
recorded history. If the consensus view regarding the origins of the Nilo-Saharan languages which came to
East Africa is adopted, and a North African or Southwest Asian origin for Afro-Asiatic languages is assumed,
the linguistic affiliation of East Africa prior to the arrival of Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic languages is left
open. The overlap between the potential areas of origin for these languages in East Africa is particularly
notable because includes the regions from which the Proto-Eurasians who brought anatomically modern
humans Out of Africa, and presumably their original proto-language or languages originated.
However, there is more agreement regarding the place of origin of the BenueCongo subfamily of languages,
which is the largest subfamily of the group, and the place of origin of the Bantu languages and the time at
which it started to expand is known with great specificity.
The classification of the relatively divergent family of Ubangian languages which are centered in the Central
African Republic, as part of the NigerCongo language family where Greenberg classified them in 1963 and
subsequently scholars concurred,[56] was called into question, by linguist Gerrit Dimmendaal in a 2008
article.[57]
Benue-Congo homeland
Roger Blench, relying particularly on prior work by Professor
Kay Williamson of the University of Port Harcourt, and the
linguist P. De Wolf, who each took the same position, has argued
that a BenueCongo linguistic subfamily of the NigerCongo
language family, which includes the Bantu languages and other
related languages and would be the largest branch of Niger
Congo, is an empirically supported grouping which probably
originated at the confluence of the Benue and Congo Rivers in
Central Nigeria.[51][58][59][60][61][62] These estimates of the
place of origin of the Benue-Congo language family do not fix a
date for the start of that expansion other than that it must have
been sufficiently prior to the Bantu expansion to allow for the
diversification of the languages within this language family that
includes Bantu.
Bantu homeland
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There is a widespread consensus among linguistic scholars that Bantu languages of the NigerCongo family
have a homeland near the coastal boundary of Nigeria and Cameroon, prior to a rapid expansion from that
homeland starting about 3000 BCE.[44][50][63][64][65][66][67]
Linguisic, archeological and genetic evidence also indicates that this expansion included "independent waves
of migration of western African and East African Bantu-speakers into southern Africa occurred."[44] In
some places, Bantu language, genetic evidence suggests that Bantu language expansion was largely a result
of substantial population replacement.[68] In other places, Bantu language expansion, like many other
languages, has been documented with population genetic evidence to have occurred by means other than
complete or predominant population replacement (e.g. via language shift and admixture of incoming and
existing populations). For example, one study found this to be the case in Bantu language speakers who are
African Pygmies or are in Mozambique,[68] while another population genetic study found this to be the case
in the Bantu language speaking Lemba of Zimbabwe.[69] Where Bantu was adopted via language shift of
existing populations, prior African languages were spoken, probably from African language families that are
now lost, except as substrate influences of local Bantu languages (such as click sounds in local Bantu
languages).
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Population genetic evidence, favors an origin for Proto-Sino-Tibetan languages in the upper and middle
Yellow River basin, with part of that source population branching off to settle in the Himalayas, with the split
of the population that would provide the genesis of the Chinese language from the population that would
provide the genesis of the larger Sino-Tibetan language family in the East Asian Neolithic era:[76]
"[T]he closest relatives of the Tibetans are the Yi people, who live in the Hengduan Mountains
and were originally formed through fusion with natives along their migration routes into the
mountains. The Tibetan and Yi languages belong to the Tibeto-Bruman language group and their
ancestries can be traced back to an ancient tribe, the Di-Qiang . . . After the ancestors of
Sino-Tibetans reached the upper and middle Yellow River basin, they divided into two
subgroups: Proto-Tibeto-Burman and Proto-Chinese. . . . The ancestral component which was
dominant in Tibetan and Yi arose from the Proto-Tibeto-Burman subgroup, which marched on
to south-west China and later, through one of its branches, became the ancestor of modern
Tibetans. Proto-Tibeto-Burmans also spread over the Hengduan Mountains where the Yi have
lived for hundreds of generations. Taking the optimal living condition and the easiest migration
route into account, we favor the single-route hypothesis; it is more likely that their migration
into the Tibetan Plateau through the Hengduan Mountain valleys occurred after Tibetan
ancestors separated from the other Proto-Tibeto-Burman groups and diverged to form the
modern Tibetan population."
One of the earliest Neolithic cultures of China in the upper to middle Yellow River basin was the Peiligang
culture of 7000 BCE to 5000 BCE, so the population genetic reference in the quoted material is to a date on
or after this time period. The Neolithic era concluded in the Yellow River around 1500 BCE. This is not
inconsistent with the linguistically based estimate from the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and
Thesaurus project. By the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCE256 BCE), the language spoken in the
Zhou court had become the standardized dialect for that kingdom.[77]
In contrast, four of the other main language families of East Asia and Southeast Asia outside the
Sino-Tibetan language family, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, HmongMien and TaiKadai, are generally
believed to have at origins at some stage of their development in Southern China.
Austroasiatic homeland
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Austroasiatic languages
HmongMien homeland
The most likely homeland of the HmongMien languages (aka MiaoYao languages) is in Southern China
between the Yangtze and Mekong rivers, but speakers of these languages may have migrated from Central
China either as part of the Han Chinese expansion or as a result of exile from an original homeland by Han
Chinese.[82] Migration of people speaking these languages from South China to Southeast Asia took place
ca. 1600-1700 CE. Ancient DNA evidence suggests that the ancestors of the speakers of the HmongMien
languages were a population genetically distinct from that of the TaiKadai and Austronesian language
source populations at a location on the Yangtze River.[83] Recent Y-DNA phylogeny evidence supports the
proposition that people who speak the Hmong-Mien languages are descended from the population that now
speaks Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer languages.[84]
Austronesian homeland
The homeland of the Austronesian languages is Taiwan.
On this island the deepest divisions in Austronesian are
found, among the families of the native Formosan
languages. According to Blust (1999), the Formosan
languages form nine of the ten primary branches of the
Austronesian language family. Comrie (2001:28) noted
this when he wrote:
... the internal diversity among the... Formosan
languages... is greater than that in all the rest of
Austronesian put together, so there is a major
The Austronesian Expansion
genetic split within Austronesian between
Formosan and the rest... Indeed, the genetic
diversity within Formosan is so great that it may well consist of several primary branches of the
overall Austronesian family.
Archaeological evidence (e.g., Bellwood 1997) suggests that speakers of pre-Proto-Austronesian spread
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from the South Chinese mainland to Taiwan at some time around 6000 BCE. Evidence from historical
linguistics suggests that it is from this island that seafaring peoples migrated, perhaps in distinct waves
separated by millennia, to the entire region encompassed by the Austronesian languages (Diamond 2000). It
is believed that this migration began around 4000 BCE (Blust 1999). However, evidence from historical
linguistics cannot bridge the gap between those two periods.
It is possible that the ancient Taiwan aborigines were related to the ancient Minyue, derived in ancient times
from the southeast coast of Mainland China, as suggested by linguists Li Jen-Kuei and Robert Blust. It is
suggested that in the southeast coastal regions of China, there were many sea nomads during the Neolithic
era and they may have spoken ancestral Austronesian languages, and were skilled seafarers.
The specific origins of most far flung member of this language family, the Malagasy language of Madagascar
off the coast of Africa, are described above in the part of this article concerning African languages.
The Austro-Tai hypothesis suggests a common origin for the Austronesian languages and the TaiKadai
languages whose hypothesized place of origin is geographically close to Taiwan.
TaiKadai homeland
Many scholars have addressed the question of the origins
of the TaiKadai languages.[85][86][87][88][89]
There is a consensus that the TaiKadai languages have
their origins in Southern China or on major nearby
islands (such as Taiwan or Hainan).
The leading hypothesis is that the likely homeland of
proto-TaiKadai was coastal Fujian or Guangdong as
part of the neolithic Longshan culture (of 3000 BCE
2000 BCE). The spread of the TaiKadai peoples may
have been aided by agriculture, but any who remained
near the coast were eventually absorbed by the Chinese.
Weera Ostapirat is one academic who articulates this
position.[90]
Laurent Sagart, on the other hand, holds that TaiKadai
is a branch of Austronesian which migrated back to the
mainland from northeastern Formosa (i.e. Taiwan) long
after Formosa was settled, but probably before the
expansion of Malayo-Polynesian out of Formosa.
The TaiKadai languages today
[91][92][93]
The language was then largely relexified from
what he believes may have been an Austroasiatic
language. Sagart suggests that Austro-Tai is ultimately related to the Sino-Tibetan languages and has its origin
in the Neolithic communities of the coastal regions of prehistoric North China or East China.
Ostapirat, by contrast, sees connections with the Austroasiatic languages (in Austric), as has Benedict.
[94][95][96]
Reid notes that the two approaches are not incompatible, if Austric is valid and can be connected
to Sino-Tibetan.[97]
Robert Blust (1999) suggests that proto-TaiKadai speakers originated in the northern Philippines and
migrated from there to Hainan (hence the diversity of TaiKadai languages on that island), and were
radically restructured following contact with HmongMien and Sinitic. However, Ostapirat maintains that
TaiKadai could not descend from Malayo-Polynesian in the Philippines, and likely not from the languages
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of eastern Formosa either. His evidence is in the TaiKadai sound correspondences, which reflect
Austronesian distinctions that were lost in Malayo-Polynesian and even Eastern Formosan.
Genetic evidence coroborates evidence from Kadai speaking people's oral traditions that puts a Kadai
homeland on Hainan.[98] Ancient DNA evidence also shows a connection between speakers of TaiKadai
speaking populations and Austronesian language speaking populations,[83] and a genetically distinct
population at a different location on the Yangtze River as a possible source of HmongMien languages.[83]
Mongolic homeland
Some historians suggest that the people assiociated with the Slab Grave Culture (1100 BC-300 BC) were the
direct ancestors of the Xiongnu and Mongols.[99] Slab Grave cultural monuments are found in Mongolia,
Inner Mongolia, Northwest China (Xinjiang region, Qilian Mountains etc.), Northeast China, Lesser Khingan
Mountains and southern Siberia. The identity of the ethnic core of Xiongnu has been a subject of varied
hypotheses and some scholars insisted on a Mongolic origin.[100] Xiongnu Empire (209-BC93 AD)
became a dominant power on the steppes of Central Asia. They were active in regions of what is now
southern Siberia, Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Xinjiang Province. According to some scientists
view, the Mongols expanded into present day Mongolia sometime after the demise of the Karasuk culture
(1500-300 BC), an Indo-European and, according to ancient DNA, genetically Western Eurasian
population.[101] Genghis Khan, starting around 1206 CE, waged a series of military campaigns that, together
with campaigns by his successors, stretched from present-day Poland in the west to Korea in the east and
from Siberia in the north to the Gulf of Oman and Vietnam in the south, after which the empire ultimately
collapsed with little long lasting linguistic impact outside the core Mongolian area.[102]
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features, but there is dispute over whether these denote a common origin, or mere linguistic borrowing due to
a sprachbund of neighboring languages that are adjacent to each other. Samuel E. Martin, Roy Andrew
Miller, and Sergei Starostin are linguists who have argued that they have common origins.[105][106]
[107][108][109]
In contrast, Alexander Vovin has argued for a regional borrowing model to explain the
linguistic similarities.[110]
One hypothesis proposes that Japanese is a relative of the extinct languages spoken by the Buyeo-Goguryeo
cultures of Korea, southern Manchuria, and Liaodong of which the best attested is the extinct language
Goguryeo.[111][112][113] This proposal is attributed to Shinmura Izuru, who proposed it in 1916. Modern
Korean, in contrast, according to proponents of this hypothesis, appears to have stronger connections the
Silla language, spoken in the ancient kingdom of Silla (57 BC AD 935), one of the Three Kingdoms of
Korea, whose similarity to the Goguryeo language is not clearly established.
The earliest Chinese historical records concerning the "Wa" in Japan indicate that they were fractured into
many warring states. But, modern Japanese dialects show a common origin, rather than a "bushy" one. So, it
is possible that there were many Yayoi dialects in the period before Old Japanese emerged, of which the
dialect of the warring states that ended up prevailing politically as the Japanese state was unified superseded
other early Yayoi languages or dialects.[114]
After a new wave of immigration, probably from the Korean Peninsula some 2,300 years ago, of the Yayoi
people, the Jmon were pushed into northern Japan. Genetic data suggest that modern Japanese are
descended from both the Yayoi and the Jmon. Tradition, as documented by the Nihon Shoki, a legendary
account of Japan's history, puts the date of the Yayoi arrival in Japan at 660 BCE. Chinese historical records
mention the existence of the Yayoi (called "Wa") starting in 57 BCE. The existing Japanese language has its
origins at approximately this point in time, if not earlier (to the extent that Japanese derives primarily from
either the language of the Bronze Age Yayoi people, as it existed prior to their arrival in Japan, or derives
primarily from a language of the Jmon at that point of time, rather than being a creole of some sort).
Skeletal remains suggests that the two cultures had fused into a group with a homogeneous physical
appearance in Southern Japan by 250 CE.[114] It is possible that the Japanese language has roots related to
the Ainu language, the historical language of the Yayoi, whatever that may have been, or could have been a
creole of both. It is also possible the Japanese has roots in a language spoken in Southern Japan that is lost
and now unknown.[114]
The Ainu people are genetic descendants of the Jmon, with some
contribution from the Okhotsk people.[115] The Ainu languages that
are now spoken by Ainu minorities in Hokkaid; and were formerly
spoken in southern and central Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands (an
area also known as Ezo), and perhaps northern Honsh island by the
Emishi people (until approximately 1000 CE), are associated with the
Location of Ezo
founding Jmon people of Japan from than 14,000 years ago or
earlier, and the Satsumon culture of Hokkaid, although the Ainu
also had contact with the Paleo-Siberian Okhotsk culture whose modern descendants include the Nivkh
people (whose original homeland was mostly occupied by the Tungusic people), which could have
linguistically influenced the Ainu language.[116] Thus, as a result of this important outside cultural influence,
it is impossible to know with certainty how similar the language of the original language of the Jmon people
was to that spoken by the Ainu people today. Some linguists have suggested other language family
connections for the Ainu language: Shafer has suggested a distant connection to the Austroasiatic
languages.[117] Vovin, had viewed that suggestion as merely preliminary.[118] Japanese linguist Shichir
Murayama tried to link Ainu to the Austronesian languages, which include the languages of the Philippines,
Taiwan, and Indonesia through both vocabulary and cultural comparisons. There is no consensus, however,
that the Ainu languages have sources in any other known language, and the unique population genetics of
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the Ainu people support the hypothesis that they were largely isolated from the rest of the world for many
thousands of years.
The Yayoi people had strong physical, genetic and cultural similarities to the Chinese during the Han
Dynasty (202 BCE-8) in the Jiangsu province on China's Eastern Coast.[119] The Yayoi also have strong
cultural similarities to the Koreans of that time period.[114][120]
Some linguists, such as Turchin,[103] see a connection between
Japanese and Korean and an Altaic language family or similar larger
grouping of languages, with those speakers coming from an area
North of Korea, based in part upon similarities in lexical roots. The
statistical method used by Turchin, however, would not discriminate
between Jmon and Yayoi sources for any Altaic linguistic affinities.
Turchin's analysis also did not look at the various proposed ancient
predecessors of the Korean language in Korea or the relationship of
those languages to any of the proto-Altaic languages, despite the fact
that the hypothesis would require one of those ancient Korean
peninsular languages to be intermediate between Japanese and one of
Location of Ryukyu Islands
the proto-Altaic languages. Old Japanese when first attested had
eight vowels, rather than the current five (which were lost within a
century of the oldest preserved writings) which was close to the vowel system seen in Uralic and Altaic
languages.[121] Old Japanese also had more grammatical similarity to Altaic languages than modern
Japanese.
These classifications of the origins of Japanese language origins ignore significant borrowing from other
languages in recent times. Current estimates are that "wago" (i.e. words attributable to the original Yayoi
language) make up 33.8% of the Japanese lexicon, that "kango" (i.e. words with roots borrowed from
Chinese since the 5th century CE) make up 49.1% of Japanese words (and in addition, the Chinese
ideograms used in the Japanese written language), that foreign words called gairaigo make up 8.8% of
Japanese words, and that 8.3% of Japanese words are konshugo that draw upon multiple languages.[122] This
account attributes only a small number of words in modern Japanese to Ainu roots.
The six Ryukyuan languages spoken in the islands to the South of Japan, are descended from Japanese but
are not mutually intelligble with Japanese with which they share about 72% of their words (or each other)
and started to diverge from Japanese around the 7th century CE. these islands were united in a Ryukyuan
kingdom from 1429 CE (prior to that there were multiple divided kingdoms which were tributary states of
China after 1372 CE); the kingdom was a tributary state of China until 1609 when it became a vassal state of
Japan, until it was annexed by Japan in 1879. These languages were then suppressed and while they have
about a million native speakers, there are relatively few native speakers under the age of twenty. They are
effectively minority languages in their own countries at this point.
Other groups
The only language isolates or language families predominantly spoken in Southeast Asia, East Asia and
Oceania that do not belong to one of the language families above are the indigenous languages of Melanesia
(which number more than eight hundred or more in perhaps sixty language families), which are described
with a geographic term that does not presume a genetic relationship between them as the Papuan languages,
and the Australian aboriginal languages (of which there are about one hundred and fifty remaining in about
ten language families, all of which, except the languages of the PamaNyungan languages are largely
confined to the central Northern coast of Australia). No linguists have found a language family connection
between indigenous Papuan and Australian aboriginal languages and those of Asia, Africa, the Americas or
any other part of the world. Indeed, no linguistic connection has been established between the indigenous
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languages of Melanesia and the indigenous languages of the Aboriginal Australians.[123] This is consistent
with the mainstream view, supported by population genetics and archaeology, that Papua New Guinea and
Australia, as well as some of the islands neighboring Papua New Guinea, were first inhabited by hominins
(humans or otherwise) at least 40,000 years ago in migrations that were either separate or swiftly segregated,
and that many of these populations have had only limited contact with outside populations until the modern
era. While there are plausible reasons to infer that the Melanesian languages and the aboriginal Australian
languages, respectively, have common origins in a small founding population with a single language, the
linguists have not been able to marshal lexical, phonetic and grammatical evidence from these languages in
their current form to support these inferences.
Eskimo-Aleut
The EskimoAleut languages are spoken by native peoples of the Arctic regions of Alaska and Canada and
Greenland, generally to the North of Na-Dene linguistic areas (shown on the map on the left).
Current ancient and modern DNA scholarship and archaeology
supports a three-layer paradigm in which first the Saqqaq (Arctic
Paleo-Eskimos) which was present 2000 BCE, then the Dorset
(second wave Arctic Paleo-Eskimos), and finally the Thule (protoInuit) from ca. 500 CE 1000 CE, successively sweep Arctic North
America while having little genetic impact on Native American
populations further South, that presumably have origins that date
back to the initial colonization of the Americas by modern humans
from Asia (who are the first hominins to live there), and ancient DNA
shows genetic continuity from the Thule to modern Inuit (whose
genetics are remarkably homogeneous), dominated by the A2a, A2b,
and D3 mtDNA haplotypes, while "Haplotype D2 (3%), found among
Eskimo-Aleut languages
modern Aleut and Siberian Eskimos, was identified at a low
frequency in the modern samples but not the ancient. This haplotype
was recently identified in an ancient Paleo-Eskimo Saqqaq individual from western Greenland. . . . Whole
genomic sequencing of the 4,000 year old PaleoEskimo, "Inuk," indicated that the Saqqaq sequences
clustered with the Chukchi and Koryaks of Siberia-suggesting an earlier migration from Siberia along the
northern slope of Alaska to Greenland."[124] Evidence such as bronze artifacts produced in East Asia from
ca. 1000 CE, further supports a proto-Eskimo-Aleut arrival in the polar regions of North America ca. 500 CE
1000 CE.[125]
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Wakashan languages
Michael Fortescue in 1998 proposed a group of Uralo-Siberian languages, in which Uralic languages like
Finnish were related to Eskimo-Aleut languages supported by lexical correspondences and grammatical
similarities, expanding upon a proposal of Morris Swadesh in 1962 that itself reiterates similarities that have
been noted since at least 1746.[127] Fortescue argues that the Uralo-Siberian proto-language (or a complex of
related proto-languages) may have been spoken by Mesolithic hunting and fishing people in south-central
Siberia (roughly, from the upper Yenisei river to Lake Baikal) between 8000 and 6000 BC, and that the
proto-languages of the derived families may have been carried northward out of this homeland in several
successive waves down to about 4000 BC, leaving the Samoyedic branch of Uralic in occupation of the
Urheimat thereafter.
A 2005 proposal by Holst, also reiterating a proposal of Swadesh from 1962, suggests that the Wakashan
languages (map on right) spoken in British Columbia around and on Vancouver Island, are part of the same
language family as the Eskimo-Aleut languages.[128] This proposal, if accurate, would suggest that Na-Dene
languages may have arrived in North America after (although not long after) Eskimo-Aleut languages.
Phonologically, the EskimoAleut languages resemble other languages of northern North America and far
eastern Siberia.
Uto-Aztecan
Some authorities on the history of the Uto-Aztecan language group
place its homeland in the border region between the USA and
Mexico, namely the upland regions of Arizona and New Mexico and
the adjacent areas of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuaua,
shown on the map (below left) roughly corresponding to the Sonoran
Desert. The proto-language would have been spoken by foragers,
about 5,000 years ago. Hill (2001) proposes instead a homeland
further south, making the assumed speakers of Proto-Uto-Aztecan
maize cultivators in Mesoamerica, who were gradually pushed north,
bringing maize cultivation with them, during the period of roughly
4,500 to 3,000 years ago, the geographic diffusion of speakers
corresponding to the breakup of linguistic unity.[129]
Tupian
Uto-Axtecan languages
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Other groups
Other than Dene-Yeniseian, and a possible connection between the Eskimo-Aleut language family and the
Uralic language family, no proposals of genetic relations between languages of North or South America and
languages of Eurasia, Africa, or other parts of the world, have been backed by credible evidence. There is
not, for example, any indication that the Vikings who had a brief presence in North America around 1000
CE left any linguistic trace.
Population genetic evidence suggests that the non-circumpolar indigenous peoples of the Americas have
origins in a small common founder population in the Upper Paleolithic era that arrived via a Berginian land
bridge from Asia.[130][131][132][133] This population genetic data point suggests the possibility that all
indigenous Native American languages of non-circumpolar indigenous Americans (i.e. neither Inuit-Aleut
nor Na-Dene) have genetic origins in a single language of the founding population of the Americas, and
hence, as controversially proposed by Greenberg, that they all ultimately belong to the same linguistic
superfamily, which Greenberg called Amerind.[134] But, there is not clear evidence of this from efforts to
use traditional comparative linguistic methods to classify indigenous Native American languages. The
process of identifying linguistic origins with traditional linguistic methods begins with the process of
classifying languages into families.
In general, more progress has been made in identify language family relationships in North America, where
the just under three hundred attested languages are grouped into twenty-nine language families and
twenty-seven language isolates (some of which are simply incapable of being classified because they are
extinct and were not sufficiently well attested to classify). Two (super-) family proposals, Penutian and
Hokan generally along the Pacific coast of North America that are gaining currency among linguists, would
reduce the number of language families in North America to about fifteen. However, in large portions of the
Southeast United States where it is known that there was considerable pre-Columbian linguistic diversity,
there are no attested indigenous languages and the populations in question either left no survivors, or all
remaining speakers of relocated tribes with diminished numbers underwent language shift as their ancestral
languages became moribund.
Mesoamerica was home to one of the most developed succession of farming societies in the Americas in the
pre-Columbian era. Mesoamerica's attested languages are likewise quite well systematized into six main
language families and four other language isolates or small language families, as well as a few unclassified
extinct languages, encompassing all of the languages in the region. Mesoamerica is also the only part of the
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languages when first settled by modern humans, given the founding population sizes for them implied by
population genetic evidence, reinforces the impossibility of making any meaningful statements about the
nature of a proto-language at a time depth of tens of thousands of years.
The expansion of particular major language families is frequently associated with the adoption of superior
food production, military technologies or social organization by a particular group of people that allowed
them to expand and exert dominance over neighborhoring societies, either ruling them or replacing them. For
example, the domestication of horses is frequently associated with the expansion of the Indo-European
language family (other linguists see an earlier expansion date which they attribute to the expansion to
farming and herding), the expansion of the Chinese language is sometimes associated first with millet and
later with rice farming, and the development of crops and domesticated animals that can thrive in tropical
environments may have been one factor in Bantu expansion. Some of the examples of this, such as the
expansions of the Hungarian, Turkish, Arabic and Chinese languages, are historically documented. Other
language replacement events are lost to history and must be inferred.
Isolates
Some languages are language isolates. That is, they have no well accepted language family connection, no
nodes in a family tree, and therefore no known Urheimat. An example is the Basque language of Northern
Spain. Nevertheless it is a scientific fact that all languages evolve. An unknown Urheimat may still be
hypothesized, such as that for a Proto-Basque, and may be defended by archaeological and historical
evidence.
Sometimes relatives are found for a language originally believed to be an isolate. An example is the Etruscan
language, which, even though only partially understood, was found to be related to the Raetic language and
to the Lemnian language. A single family may be an isolate. In the case of the non-Austronesian indigenous
languages of Papua New Guinea and the indigneous languages of Australia, there is no published linguistic
hypothesis supported by any evidence that these languages have links to any other families. Nevertheless an
unknown Urheimat is implied. The entire Indo-European family itself is a language isolate: no further
connections are known. This lack of information does not prevent some professional linguists from
formulating additional hypothetical nodes (Nostratic) and additional homelands for the speakers.
Shared urheimats
Other circumstances can also complicate the matter. For example, in places where language families meet,
like the interface of the Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic language family in Western Ethiopia, the relationship
between a group that speaks a language and the Urheimat for that language is complicated by "processes of
migration, language shift and group absorption are documented by linguists and ethnographers" in groups
that are themselves "transient and plastic."[138]
Also, over a sufficient period of time, in the absence of evidence of intermediary steps in the process, it may
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be impossible to observe linkages between languages that have a shared urheimat. This general concern is a
manifestation of the larger issue of "time depth" in historical linguistics.[139] For example, while the
evidence from genetics, archeology and historical climate change strongly points to a relatively small number
of waves in a fairly short time period from Asia to the Americas,[140] there continues to be intense
controversy regarding the classification of the indigenous languages of the Americas, for which there is little
direct evidence because all but a couple of those languages were not written in the pre-Columbian era, and
in Australia and New Guinea, whose history of human migration and contact is also well documented.[141]
Given enough time, natural change in isolated language can obliterate any meaningful linguistic evidence of
a known common genetic source for the languages.
See also
Sprachraum
Nationalism and ancient history
Footnotes
1. ^ Mallory 1989, p. 143.
/indusscript.html). Harappa.com.
Old Indo-Aryan"
(http://www.ejvs.laurasianacademy.com/ejvs0501
Press. p. 48.
5 June 2008
scenarios" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Bibcode:2006PNAS..103..843S
(http://www.frontline.in/navigation/?type=static&
(http://adsabs.harvard.edu
page=archiveSearch&aid=20031107000807300&
/abs/2006PNAS..103..843S).
doi:10.1073/pnas.0507714103 (http://dx.doi.org
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16415161).
(http://lists.hcs.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/protodravidian).
8. ^ Southworth, Franklin C. (2006). "Proto-
/~fsouth/Proto-DravidianAgriculture.pdf).
University of Pennsylvania.
(http://download.cell.com/AJHG/pdf
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doi:10.2307/592159 (http://dx.doi.org
/10.2307%2F592159).
doi:10.1086/499411 (http://dx.doi.org
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles
328356, doi:10.1017/s0041977x00072517
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16400607).
(http://dx.doi.org
/10.1017%2Fs0041977x00072517).
22. ^ Zvelebil, Kamal (2006). Dravidian Languages. In
Encyclopdia Britannica (DVD edition).
doi:10.1007/s10038-005-0284-2 (http://dx.doi.org
/10.1007%2Fs10038-005-0284-2),
267277.
/pubmed/16205836)
the theory
25. ^ Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju (2003). The Dravidian
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.cub.2009.11.053),
/pubmed/20178765)
16. ^ Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca (1994). The History
(http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v19/n2
Melano-Indians" (http://www.svabhinava.org
/AITvsOIT/Sergent-AfroDravidian-frame.php). La
doi:10.1038/ejhg.2010.153 (http://dx.doi.org
/10.1038%2Fejhg.2010.153).
30 Jun. 2008
doi:10.2307/411899 (http://dx.doi.org
doi:10.1002/ajpa.1064 (http://dx.doi.org
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Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Urheimat&
oldid=615692912#Dravidian_homeland"
Categories: Historical linguistics Origin hypotheses of ethnic groups German words and phrases
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