The role of contact and language shift in the spread of Austronesian languages across Island Southeast Asia

The spread of modern humans into and across Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific represents the earliest confirmed dispersal of humans across a marine environment, and involved numerous associated technologies that indicate sophisticated societies on the move. The later spread of ‘Austronesian’ over the region shows language replacement on a scale that is reminiscent of the period of state-sponsored European colonization, and yet the Austronesian languages present a typological profile that is more diverse than any other large language family. These facts require investigation. This chapter examines the separate, but intertwined, histories of the region. It shows that the dispersal of Austronesian languages, originating in Taiwan, should not be portrayed as a technological and demographic steamroller. This involves discussion of the nature of pre-Austronesian society and language in the south-west Pacific, and the degree to which it has and has not changed following ‘Austronesianization’.

Time, diversification, and dispersal on the Australian continent

Sahul, the ancient continent uniting Australia and New Guinea, is the only inhabited continent uniquely occupied by small-scale societies until colonial contact. And Australia (only separated from New Guinea for 10,000 years) is the only continent exclusively occupied by hunter-gatherers. This makes Sahul, and Australia, crucial for understanding how language has evolved through our deep human past. This chapter addresses three enigmas: first the discrepancy in deep linguistic diversity and typological disparity between the Australian and New Guinea hemi-continents (1 maximal clade in Australia, over 50 in New Guinea), second the apparent relatedness of all Australian indigenous languages despite continuous human occupation for 60,000 years with no external intrusions, and third the recent spread of the Pama-Nyungan branch of the Australian family over seven-eighths of the continent, most likely in the mid-Holocene?

Large and ancient linguistic areas

Large-scale areal patterns point to ancient population history and form a well-known confound for language universals. Despite their importance, demonstrating such patterns remains a challenge. This chapter argues that large-scale area hypotheses are better tested by modeling diachronic family biases than by controlling for genealogical relations in regression models. A case study of the Trans-Pacific area reveals that diachronic bias estimates do not depend much on the amount of phylogenetic information that is used when inferring them. After controlling for false discovery rates, about 39 variables in WALS and AUTOTYP show diachronic biases that differ significantly inside vs. outside the Trans-Pacific area. Nearly three times as many biases hold outside than inside the Trans-Pacific area, indicating that the Trans-Pacific area is not so much characterized by the spread of biases but rather by the retention of earlier diversity, in line with earlier suggestions in the literature.

Geographical axis effects in large-scale linguistic distributions

Taking up Diamond’s (1999) geographical axis hypothesis regarding the different population histories of continental areas, Güldemann (2008, 2010) proposed that macro-areal aggregations of linguistic features are influenced by geographical factors. This chapter explores this idea by extending it to the whole world in testing whether the way linguistic features assemble over long time spans and large space is influenced by what we call “latitude spread potential” and “longitude spread constraint.” Regarding the former, the authors argue in particular that contact-induced feature distributions as well as genealogically defined language groups with a sufficient geographical extension tend to have a latitudinal orientation. Regarding the latter, the authors provide first results suggesting that linguistic diversity within language families tends to be higher along longitude axes. If replicated by more extensive and diverse testing, the authors’ findings promise to become important ingredients for a comprehensive theory of human history across space and time within linguistics and beyond.

Amazonian linguistic diversity and its sociocultural correlates

Lowland South America’s striking linguistic diversity presents a major puzzle to scholars of language and human prehistory. This chapter proposes that sociocultural practices provide important clues to a solution, and that linguistic differentiation across Amazonian groups is not so much a factor of isolation, but rather of interaction. Evidence includes the recurrence of regional ‘systems’ across the Amazon basin, characterized by similarly essentializing views linking language and identity, and accompanied by restrained lexical borrowing and code-switching on the one hand, but convergence in grammar and discourse on the other. These phenomena may be grounded in the widespread view that social identity depends on the active maintenance of contrasts, including those relating to language.

Language diversification and contact in Africa

The linguistic map of Africa as it manifests itself in its gestalt to us today is the result of a range of factors, involving climate change, technological innovations, as well as social conditions. Climate change resulted in the expansion as well as reduction of human habitation and thereby of language families. Technological changes, for example the introduction of pastoralism or agriculture also must have played an important role in the creation of new linguistic areas. A quintessential role, however, is to be attributed to social factors determining whether linguistic boundaries are maintained or dissolved.

Patterns of dispersal and diversification in Island Southeast Asia and Oceania

This chapter presents some background considerations relevant to the patterns of language dispersal and diversification in Island Southeast Asia and Oceania. First an overview of languages and language families is given, including three large families—the widely dispersed Austronesian family, the Trans New Guinea (TNG) family in New Guinea, and the Pama-Nyungan family in Australia—as well as many smaller families and isolates. Then the main distinctive typological features of Austronesian languages, New Guinea and Australia are presented. Australia shows surprising structural homogeneity when compared to New Guinea and even to Austronesian. Subsequent sections cover the history of the study of the languages in the region, the history of the region itself, and issues for further research, including the mechanisms in the spread of Austronesian and the language development of New Guinea. The chapter concludes with a brief summary of the chapters in the book regarding the region.

Sociolinguistic typology and the uniformitarian hypothesis

One of the bases of historical linguistics is the uniformitarian principle: knowledge of processes that operated in the past can be inferred by observing ongoing processes in the present. This leads us to the methodological principle of using the present to explain the past. This chapter presents a sociolinguistic-typological perspective which investigates the extent to which it is possible to produce sociolinguistic explanations for linguistic structures. Insofar as the characteristics of individual languages are due to the nature of the human language faculty, there cannot be any questioning of the uniformitarian principle. But what if some of the characteristics of individual languages are due to social factors? Then the common faculty of the human mind will produce different types of structure in different societies at different moments in history. So the linguistic present might not altogether be like the linguistic past; and the methodology of using-the-present-to-explain-the-past could be less useful the further back in time we go.

Dispersal patterns shape areal typology

The sociolinguistics of language contact is known to effect levels of phonological and grammatical complexity of the languages involved, and linguistic features are known to have different levels of stability and different propensities of borrowing and diffusion. This chapter lays out basic taxonomies of demographic and geographical histories of areas, stability or instability or linguistic variables, and ages of areas, and raises hypotheses about correlations among them. Pilot studies of ten areas worldwide support the expected correlations.

Patterns of dispersal and diversification in South America

This chapter presents some of the main issues relating to language diversification in South America. How to explain the large number of genealogical units (107–118) in the continent, in view of its relatively recent human settlement, probably around 15,000 years ago? First the chapter presents the major language families such as Arawakan and Tupian. Then the chapter describes the major typological patterns characterizing the continent and their geographical distribution in terms of linguistic areas and the putative Andean-Amazonian divide, which is questioned here. A number of potential explanations for the diversity are presented: few large empires, geographical barriers, late development of food crops, possible effects of European invasion, ethos of ethnic boundary maintenance, and low population densities until recently. There is no conclusive evidence yet for any single explanation. The chapter concludes with a brief summary of the chapters in the book regarding South America.