Beruflich Dokumente
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[DRAFT SUBMITTED FOR REVIEW -NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT REFERENCE TO THE
AUTHOR]
Roger Blench
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
University of Cambridge
Correspondence to:
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TABLES
Table 1. Periods when modern humans reached different regions.................................................................... 2
Table 2. Word order characteristics in specific regions of the world................................................................ 3
Table 3. Typological features globally common but absent in Australia.......................................................... 4
Table 4. Language Phyla of SE Asia................................................................................................................. 5
Table 5. Global cultural elements absent in Australia....................................................................................... 6
Table 6. MSEA common cultural elements ...................................................................................................... 6
MAPS
Map 1. The expansion of modern humans ........................................................................................................ 2
ABSTRACT
It is unlikely that local or highly specific typological characteristics of language correlate with other aspects
of human culture and history. However, at regional scale, the broad typology of languages in Australia or the
New World reflect bottlenecks, where the absence of an interchange with languages displaying divergent
characteristics has resulted in remarkable homogeneity. The paper argues that these regions of high
typological similarity are due neither to chance nor long-term convergence, but reflect the initial conditions
of settlement. In other words, if Australian languages are typologically very homogenous, this is because
they are the descendants of the language of the first settlers. This suggests that regions can be characterised
by negative typology, i.e. the absence of globally common traits, and that this results from population
bottlenecks. Conversely, in regions where there has been considerably movement of population, such as
Eurasia, typological diversity will be the norm. Another category of typological uniformity occurs in
mainland SE Asia, a region notable for the similarities between language structures, even in languages of
quite separate phyla. It is suggested that this can be linked to the political and social change in the region
after 4000 BP, when the rapid development of the SE Asian Neolithic transformed a population of scattered
foragers into the highly structured rice-growers of the present. The conclusion is that an expansion of the
remit of typology to uncover large regional patterns can also be tied to the archaeological narrative of the
early expansion of modern humans.
Keywords; Linguistic typology; archaeology; prehistory; material culture
This paper was prepared at the request of the editor of LT, Frans Plank.
An important element in this narrative is the relative ease of back-migration and waves of subsequent
migration. Africa and Eurasia present essentially no obstacles to movement, and everything we know about
their languages and archaeology suggests a high degree of mobility. Interestingly, eastern Eurasia, the region
approximately corresponding to the former Soviet Union, does show some intriguing homogeneity, for
example in constituent order, which may reflect the difficulties of movement in regions of extreme cold.
Exactly the opposite is true of Australia and Melanesia, where initial settlement seems to been the end of
the line, with no new major demographic movements into the region.
The New World is characterised by numerous language phyla, but the consensus of archaeology is that all its
populations arrived via Siberia. Though the population presumably came in waves, with the ancestors of the
Na-Dene and the Eskimo-Aleut the most recent. New World languages do present some typological
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http://wals.info/
The map in Dryer (WALS) does not indicate the close correlation between the Niger-Congo branches and constituent
order although it shows the marked predominance of SVO.
Veselinova
Comrie
Unique globally