Introducing the Players

The indigenous language map of the world, as we know it after stripping away the European colonial languages, does not reveal a picture of even gradation in which all languages prior to AD 1500 were equally different from all neighboring languages, without sharp boundaries. If it did, human prehistory would require little explanation; all societies would presumably have evolved in situ, hand-in-hand with their neighbors and with only localized reassortments since linguistically competent human societies first spread across the earth.

In fact, the language map of the world shows some very clear-cut patterns of differentiation, not only in clines of diversity, but also in sharp boundaries between language families, most of which are sufficiently bounded and defined in linguistic terms that they stand apart from each other as discrete and unarguable entities. Although there are "problem" languages in this regard, especially the creoles, pidgins, and other linguistic entities which resist genetic classification, the major families of the world are very well founded in terms of comparative linguistic data. They are not merely deceptive crystallizations out of an even mesh of language diversity. As Aikhenvald and Dixon (2001:6) point out, "It is often easier to prove that a set of languages form a genetic unit (a language family) than it is to establish subsidiary genetic units (subgroups) within a family."

Because the component languages within the well-defined families share a common genetic ancestry, and because many of these families had reached (in ancestral form) their current geographical limits well back in prehistoric times, we are forced to assume that they owe their existences to processes which took place long before the rise of conquest states, literacy, world religions, and centralized systems of education and language domination. In other words, they are solidly "prehistoric," pre-literate, and pre-state. Families which certainly spread over vast distances in prehistoric times include Indo-European, Dravidian, "Altaic" (a controversial macrofamily that might include Turkic, Mongolian, and perhaps even Japanese), Uralic, Afroasiatic, Benue-Congo (including Bantu), Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, and many of the

major families of the Americas such as Uto-Aztecan, Algonquian, and Arawak (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). Of course, subgroups of many of these families - Germanic, Sinitic, and Malayic, for instance - have undergone considerable expansion in historical times, but this does not negate the observation that the origins of all these families and either much or all of their foundation geographical expansion occurred long before written history began.

On the other hand, some other language families, such as Khoisan and NiloSaharan of Africa, probably most of the families of northern Australia, parts of New Guinea and northwestern North America, together with the several small language isolates dotted here and there across the world (e.g., Basque), might have remained relatively static for enormous time spans without significant movement at all, except for contraction due to language competition. Colin Renfrew (1992a, 1992b), for instance, regards such language groups as established very early in the history of modern human global colonization.

If all the major language families of the world imply human population expansions, as suggested here, then we have a situation of immense significance, especially in the Old World where a small number of language families have expanded to enormous extents in quite recent prehistoric time. In order to understand this significance, especially in relation to the archaeological and genetic histories of human populations, we need to understand how languages and language families have evolved in time and space in the minds and mouths of actual speakers. We cannot decide this solely from the comparative reconstruction of proto-languages and subgroup relationships since these tell us most directly about the languages themselves, rather than their speakers, just as the archaeological record tells us essentially about material culture and only secondarily about its makers. We need a worldwide comparative viewpoint that must be derived from available historical and ethnographic records of language spread and replacement history, as recorded from the ancient world onward, and from the data of sociolinguistics - the study of language in relation to social factors.

Such comparative data allow us to think seriously about a number of questions important for interpreting ancient language history, even though we are working with gradations of likelihood, not proof. How do languages spread, how fast do they change through time, how do languages compete with and replace each other, what happens when the speakers of different languages

interact, and how do the answers to these questions vary according to the socioeconomic situation? Isolated preliterate Neolithic tribes and huge centralized empires with literacy and high levels of ethnic diversity are most unlikely to have undergone identical linguistic histories.

How Do Languages and Language Families

Spread?

The only plausible explanation of the currency of [Indo-European] languages so similar over so large an area at the beginnings of historical periods is that they derive from dialects of a fairly homogeneous prehistoric language which had been disseminated by migrations out of a smaller region. (Friedrich 1966)

Language spread without a significant movement of people is seemingly a rare phenomenon in North America. (Foster 1996:67)

Linguists often make the assumption that a true language family, one which can be shown by the comparative study of shared innovations to be internally structured genetically, with an array of reconstructed proto-languages, must owe its existence to some kind of population expansionary process. From a comparative perspective this is the only explanation that makes sense. Historical data indicate that language shift alone, without population movement or some degree of dispersal by the population carrying the target language, has never created anything remotely equaling those vast inter-continental genetic groupings of languages with which we are here concerned. One has only to examine the varying linguistic histories of many the great conquest empires of the past - Assyrian, Achaemenid, Hellenistic, Roman, Mongol, Aztec, even Spanish and British - to realize this. Imperial conquest by itself, without largescale and permanent settlement by members of the conquering population, generally imposes little apart from loan words in the long term.

Trade also is generally of little significance as a factor behind large-scale language spread. Consider the situation in trader-conscious Papua New Guinea, where the linguistic diversity reached record levels (New Guinea had about 760 languages) in ethnographic times and is only now being leveled by Tok Pisin and English, awesomely backed by the modem muscle of statehood, literacy, television, and the circumvention of group endogamy owing to massive social change (Kulick 1992). Yet even with all this inducement, on a scale totally

inapplicable to situations in remote prehistory, the dominance of Tok Pisin remains only a local phenomenon on a whole-Pacific scale. Conquest, trade, and cultural diffusion can spread languages, but never on a trans-continental language family scale unless assisted by another factor, this being actual movement of existing speakers of the languages concerned.

Rather than examining at great length here the historical documentation necessary to support these views, I will focus on the example of the seventh century AD Arab conquests out of Arabia, in support of the idea that successful language spread required in the first instance a spread of native speakers. We look first at the spread of the Arabic language itself (Khoury and Kostiner 1990; Goldschmidt 1996; Levtzion 1979; Pentz 1992; Petry 1998). In parts of Jordan and Syria there were already widespread and numerous Arabic-speaking populations who had migrated northward out of Arabia long before the seventh century, so the Muslim conquest here did not require extensive language replacement. The introduction of Arabic into Iraq and Egypt required conquest, and occurred via garrison cities of settled Arab soldiers (about 40,000 in the case of Fustat near Cairo) and their families. So a spread of Arabic, in the first instance, in the mouths of settlers and soldiers is not in doubt, regardless of how many people (in North Africa, for instance) might later have adopted that language.

However, the Arab conquests did not extend into South or Southeast Asia, or even directly into Iran and Pakistan. Thus, the vast majority (perhaps 80 percent) of Muslims in the world today, more in Indonesia than in any other country, do not speak Arabic (apart from loan words) unless they are reciting the Koran, in which case they use seventh-century rather than modem Arabic. As Mansfield (1985:40) notes: "although Arabic language and culture retain a special and predominant place in the world of Islam, only about one fifth of the one sixth of mankind who are Muslims are Arabic speaking." This gives us a major negative example - no population movement, no language spread, regardless of what might have happened with the religion.

The Indonesian experience with the spread of Islam recapitulated that which occurred there a millennium earlier with the spreads of Hinduism and Buddhism from India. In this case there was also no major population movement into Southeast Asia, apart perhaps from a trickle of traders and religious functionaries, despite the profound socio-cultural impact of the Indic

religions, modes of kingship, and literally hundreds of Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Tamil loan words in the Malay and Javanese languages (Gonda 1973). Yet Indonesians never converted to the use of Indic languages in any but learned circumstances, and Indonesian and Indian languages do not even share any noticeable typological features as a result of the contact. As Colin Masica (1976:184) points out, religious and political domination alone is not sufficient to promote such convergence; one needs "more intimate, less structured, intercourse."

The moral of all this is that Arabic spread essentially, in the first place, in the mouths of Arabic-speaking settlers in the conquered areas of the Middle East and North Africa only, and in the early years it seems there was very little shift to the language by other non-Arab populations. The whole process was no doubt assisted by the association of Arabic with the Koran, but even this was clearly not a driving factor behind significant language spread. In later centuries, of course, many Middle Eastern and North African populations not of Arab origin must have adopted the Arabic language, but this is a little beside the point. Our interest here is in the original spread and its causation, and this was manifestly not a spread caused by language shift, but by native speaker movement.

If a cosmopolitan language such as Arabic had such difficulty in spreading into regions not settled by Arabs, even aided by a document as linguistically persuasive as the Koran, likewise Sanskrit with the Mahabharata, what hope can we have that Neolithic languages could have spread over the vast distances required to found language families by such means? We see a picture similar to that for Arabic with Latin, which at the end of the Roman Empire only became a lasting vernacular, as the mother tongue of the Romance languages, in those regions close to the heart of the empire favored for intensive settlement by Latin speakers (Iberia, southern France, Romania - rather brutally conquered by Trajan, and Italy itself; Krantz 1988; Brosnahan 1963). Greek died beyond Greece and Asia Minor with the decline of the Hellenistic kingdoms, even though in this case there was some colonization by the followers of Alexander the Great and his successors, albeit in small numbers compared to the surrounding native populations.

Conversely, the English language spread into the Americas and Australasia through massive levels of population movement, backed up by continuous

outflow from the source region. However, in other regions dominated by British conquest and control, such as South Asia, much of Africa, and Malaysia, the existing dense populations together with tropical diseases kept the colonization process at bay, as described so lucidly by Alfred Crosby (1986). English in Africa, India, and Malaysia today is mainly spoken by elites and shows no sign of replacing dominant native languages such as Hindi, Tamil, or Malay. According to Breton (1997), there were only 202,000 native English speakers in India in the 1981 census year, mostly Anglo-Indian, although 11 million people used English as a secondary language (out of a total population of 1,100 million). Dutch today is essentially an extinct language in Indonesia, despite 300 years of colonial government, but with no population movement from the Netherlands into Indonesia on any scale.

Basically, and right at the heart of the matter in terms of the theme of this book, is the observation that a major language family, if it is identified by the comparative method as a genetic unit with a history of differentiation from a common ancestral language (or a series of related dialects), can only have been spread by processes of movement by native speakers, not by language shift alone. The relevance of this observation for recent human prehistory as a whole (given that clear-cut evidence for linguistic relationship of the kind being examined here does not survive for much more than 10,000 years) is quite colossal. Since much of the world is divided amongst quite a small number of major language families, recent human prehistory is perhaps to be written very much in terms of a small number of equivalent massive continentwide dispersals of population.

But, and this I think is a most important proviso, it should not be assumed that such spreading populations of native speakers were always derived entirely from the localized population amongst whom the language family originated in the first place. The world has far too many situations where biology and language do not agree in precise unison, and such situations demand explanation. As examples we have clear biological differences between western Europeans and South Asians who speak IndoEuropean languages, and between Melanesians and Filipinos who speak Austronesian languages. Language shift and contact-induced language change obviously matter today and have mattered throughout history, but we must beware of giving them a relevance beyond their due. We consider them in more detail below.