Mini-Seminar: An agenda for palaeosociolinguistics. Using ethnographic models to interpret patterns in historical linguistics, with Roger Blench

Abstract

One major problem for dating the origin and dispersal of language phyla, or indeed their individual branches, is that they do not  diversify at a standard rate. Once the great hope for dating language families, and regularly invented with ‘new’ mathematical methods and improved algorithms, glottochronology continues to fail to convince all but small circles of acolytes. The development and expansion of individual phyla and families seems more like punctuated equilibrium, periods of near static followed by bursts of either extinction or rapid diversification. This is better explained by episodes of socio-political change, for example the establishment of a centralised polity, or alternatively the collapse of such systems due to warfare, epidemics or natural disaster. In some cases this can be detected in the historical, archaeological or genetic record, but in other examples, the linguistic facts require a hypothesis to explain such change. Importantly, this cannot be ascribed to exclusively linguistic factors. External developments, such as technology advances, epidemic disease, or military conquest will need to be invoked and can often be determined from the historical or archaeological record.

I propose to name this procedure palaeosociolinguistics, the application of sociolinguistic principles to past scenarios of language diversification and change. The paper discusses four areas where there is an interface between the claims of historical linguistics and sociological processes.

• Language levelling
• Borrowing between closely related languages
• Negative reconstruction and subsistence changes
• Creoles and other types of language mixing

Examples used to illustrate these are drawn from the dispersal of Afroasiatic, the contrast between expected and actual diversity on Madagascar, and language mixing in Southern African languages.

Invited seminar speaker: Roger Blench, a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a PhD from the University of Cambridge and is based in Cambridge, England. He researches, publishes, and works as a consultant.