Languages in Competition - Language Shift

The essential factor in long-distance language spread and continuing long-term survival in vernacular form at the whole population level, especially in pre-state circumstances, is a sufficiency of population movement at the base of the dispersal. Ephemeral languages of trade or government that fade away as soon as the organizational structure beneath them is removed are of little historical interest for the issues discussed here. The significance of population movement can be established by analyzing any major historical situation.

But languages rarely spread through uninhabited voids, except in cases of initial human colonization of new lands. Native populations will sometimes adopt languages brought in by outsiders who represent larger (in demographic terms), more powerful, and more prestigious cultures, although this need not happen in all cases. Indeed, if colonists/ conquerors do not have a demographic advantage over the long term, for instance the Normans in England, the British in Malaysia, the Dutch in Indonesia, and even the Hellenistic Greeks in central Asia, then their languages will rarely be adopted as the vernacular by large, healthy, and culturally viable native populations. Nevertheless, language shift is important and must be an essential ingredient in explaining the many cases in large-scale human patterning where linguistic and biological distributions show discordance.

Spreading languages also have a natural attraction for speakers of other more local languages in areas of high linguistic diversity - they allow access to widespread contacts and resources otherwise only available through laborious processes of multilingualism. Thus, they can become lingua francas - success breeds more success, at least for a time. As Cooper notes (1982:17): "nothing stops the spread of a lingua franca more surely than the existence of a rival lingua franca." But in the early days of agricultural dispersal the other lingua francas were surely few and far between. It is likely that the early spread of Austronesian languages into Melanesia was lubricated because Proto-Oceanic (the reconstructed proto-language of the period of Austronesian colonization beyond the Bismarck Archipelago) represented a useful degree of uniformity,

perhaps as a lingua franca, throughout a network of highly diversified coastal Papuan languages.

If we are to understand the past through the lens of comparative linguistics we need to understand a little about why language shift can occur. Some linguists take the view that languages spread automatically by shift, with no movement of native speakers of the target languages (the ones being shifted to) at all (Nichols 1997b). I am not aware of any historical, anthropological, or linguistic data that render such a view very convincing, at least not on the large-scale language family canvas under consideration here. Language shift is not a simple matter, as anyone who has tried to learn a second language will know (the "foreign accent" problem). The very important factor termed "language loyalty" (Haugen 1988) generally means that a population will not give up its native language unless it is already bilingual in both this and the target language to which the shift will eventually occur. Even then, multilingualism can be stable and long lasting. Eventual shift will require deep influence from the culture that "owns" the target language, influence that will normally require a preexisting substantial presence of native speakers amongst the linguistically different native population (Nettle 1998, 1999).

There must also be a reason for the shift to occur. In the case of the Agta Negrito hunter-gatherers of the Philippines, all of whom adopted Austronesian languages long ago, the shifts were probably due to a wish to trade and to provide field labor in return for agricultural produce, plus a generally increasing encapsulation of the Agta by Austronesian farmers. The original shift seems to have operated as a process of creolization, according to Lawrence Reid (1994a, 1994b), followed later by a "decreolization" process as encapsulation and the intensity of Austronesian influence became stronger.

There can also be active forces working against language shift in situations where one might expect it to occur. Heath and Laprade (1982:137) describe 16th-century Indian reluctance to learn Spanish in the Andes, preferring instead to adopt the important Indian languages Quechua and Aymara, which were also used widely in Spanish missions for translation of the Bible:

Castilian did not spread into workaday technical uses for a majority of the Indians. It became the sometime language of administrative and judicial affairs, and the tongue of those who were able to gain access to the creole

class. Its use was primarily restricted to urban areas, ... in the countryside it remained limited to uses in churches and governmental units. For the majority of rural Indians, it was grafted onto religious rituals, sacred texts, and polite associations with their oppressors. In some cases, the highprestige language was adopted by the Indians in low-prestige functions, and the language was debunked even by those who learned it (e.g., in its use by Indian males when they were drunk). From the colonial policy perspective, there was a great disparity between the potential and actual spread of Castilian.

Interestingly, of course, many millions of American Indians still speak their native languages today - not all have simply converted to Spanish or Portuguese. As another example, Joseph Errington (1998) describes Indonesian resistance to adopting Javanese as a national language and lingua franca, despite the fact that it is the native language of the ruling Javanese elite. Instead, the leaders of independent Indonesia in 1947 chose Malay, a trader language used across Indonesia since Islamic times and thus a neutral language not tied to ethnicity or control. In Errington's terms, the spread of Malay, as Bahasa Indonesia, has been miraculous and unique, as any traveler to the remotest corners of Indonesia will have observed. But even so, Bahasa Indonesia is not replacing Javanese in Java itself, where instead we have the formation of a stable diglossia in which both languages mutually influence each other.

The moral of all this is that language shift is not an automatic result of contact between speakers of different languages, even if one is more "prestigious" than the other. Neither is it an inevitable final state amongst bior multilingual populations. It is an important process, but one that is completely unconvincing as an explainer of language family spreads over vast distances by Neolithic or Formative farmers.

Languages in competition - contact-induced change

As noted, when speakers of two different languages are brought together by the inmigration of one of the groups, it is not a foregone conclusion that one language will automatically scoop the pool and replace the other. Stable situations can evolve in which many languages coexist because the majority of the population is either bior multilingual. In such situations the small local languages can often undergo "oneway leaning" toward the models provided by the more widely spoken community languages, by means of a process termed metatypy by the linguist Malcolm Ross (1997, 2001). Metatypy is one aspect of a large field of contact-induced language change, a field that runs from limited borrowing of a few vocabulary items, through metatypy, to "interference through shift," a process whereby a population that adopts a new language will also modify that language by carrying over aspects of their previous language. Such modifications can often involve far more than just a "foreign accent" factor and can sometimes lead to considerable structural change in the successful language, as in the many regional versions of modem English spoken by aboriginal populations across the world.' Many of these contact-induced processes of change, however, stop short of actual language replacement.

Contact-induced change on a deep level, beyond superficial borrowing, will normally only operate if the speakers of two or more languages in contact are bior multilingual. As Marianne Mithun (1999:314) points out: "Cultural traits are of course more easily diffused than linguistic ones, which require intensive contact and in many cases bilingualism." As noted above, such bilingualism will not in itself encourage language shift, and amongst healthy and demographically viable populations the result is likely to be long-term situations of contact-induced change. This process has already been referred to as reticulation, the operation of areal diffusion for long periods between much shorter dispersive punctuations. In extreme cases, if the reticulation is allowed to run unchecked for several millennia, the result can be a breakdown of subgrouping structure altogether. Dixon (1997) claims this for many Australian languages, and George Grace (1990) suggests it to be the case for the Austronesian languages of New Caledonia, where languages lose forms and then borrow them back from widespread neighboring languages with such

intensity that discrete languages no longer exist.

As Grace also notes, however, this situation is rather extreme. The great majority of Austronesian languages elsewhere are far more amenable to application of the comparative method. It seems that such extreme cases of areal diffusion exist mainly amongst small-scale egalitarian societies with limited systems of political integration, especially in those that lack formal descent groups (Foley 1986).6 Societies with corporate land-holding descent groups, and especially chiefdoms and states, usually contain more homogeneous and widespread languages owing to their much larger networks of communication and control (e.g., Dahlin et al. 1987 for the Maya lowlands). Situations of extreme areal interaction have little relevance for language spread, or for the episodes of agricultural population dispersal in which we are most interested.

We have now reviewed most of the features of the linguistic record that need to be taken into account in the reconstruction of linguistic prehistory. These comparative observations are most useful for guidance, and, as noted, can never make any given interpretation an absolute certainty. But having them in the background can make the inferences to be presented on language family dispersal a great deal more convincing. As far as language spread at the family level is concerned, population movement would appear to be far more convincing as a long-distance mover than other more reticulative forms of interpopulation contact.

Chapter 10

The Spread of Farming: Comparing

the Archaeology and the

Linguistics

This chapter examines the patterns of origin and dispersal for the major agriculturalist language families, as visible from the viewpoint of comparative linguistics. The question at this point is whether the foundation "layers" of language families/subgroups, and Neolithic/ Formative farming economies and material cultures, could have spread together.

First of all, Figure 1.3 encapsulates current understanding of the archaeological record pertaining to the origins and spreads of the major agricultural systems and the cultures associated with them, as dealt with in chapters 3 to 8. It is not necessary to justify these conclusions further at this point, although I would not be so unwise as to claim that they are fixed and immutable. New data might impose changes, yet my feeling is that we have enough of a world archaeological record to make it unlikely that any complete upheaval will occur.

The distributions of the major agriculturalist languages at AD 1500 are delineated in Figures 1.1 and 1.2, together with those of the major huntergatherer families. If the homelands and directions of spread of agricultural systems and technologies, as modeled in Figure 1.3, were indeed concurrent with the homelands and directions of spread of the major agriculturalist language families, then we should expect a number of correlations. Relevant language families should have their putative homelands located within or close to agricultural homelands; they should overlap or intersect geographically within or close to agricultural homelands; and they should have dispersal histories that commence chronologically within agricultural homeland areas and then become progressively younger with distance away from such homelands.

To see if there are such correlations, we turn to the history of the major agriculturalist language families themselves, those that cover large extents of terrain in agricultural latitudes and that have reconstructed agricultural terminology, including names for crops and domesticated animals, in their proto-languages. As far as these target language families are concerned, there are three essential arenas of linguistic reconstruction that are of immediate interest, these being the identification of homelands, the identification of early cultural vocabularies (especially those pertaining to agriculture), and the histories of expansion and dispersal of their major subgroups. Questions of macrofamily affiliation for individual language families also arise.

Western and Central Eurasia, and Northern

Africa

The major language families to be considered in this region are Indo-European, Afroasiatic, and (Elamo-)Dravidian. The Indo-European and Afroasiatic families today occupy much of the area covered in prehistory by the Southwest Asian agropastoral combination of crops and animals, and it is possible that Dravidian originated also within this region. Indo-European and Afroasiatic are flanked to the south and east respectively by the African and East Asian monsoonal zones, with their quite different rainfall regimes and domesticated plant species, and to the north by regions beyond the range of Neolithic farmers. There are disputed linguistic claims that these three families belong in one macrofamily, termed Nostratic, and we return to this concept later.