Mini-Seminar: Treating language contact as normal: coalescent-theoretic modeling of the prehistory of the Bantu language family

Abstract

The Bantu language family of sub-Saharan Africa is among the world’s largest in terms of the number of languages, geographical extent, and number of speakers. The expansion of the Bantu languages is a major example of large-scale language-family expansion in human history.
To learn the early prehistory of the Bantu language family, one needs to disentangle the signal of the original splits and diversification from that of subsequent language contact, which is known to be strong in Bantu.

We introduce a new coalescent-theoretic model to study the prehistory of the Bantu family computationally. Our model treats language contact as a norm rather than a rare exception, in contrast to earlier computational work. Using Approximate Bayesian Computation, we show that rates of both language change and language contact were so high within the Bantu that the signal of the original diversification has been largely erased in the currently available Bantu lexical data.

Seminar speaker: Patricia Santos, a postdoctoral researcher in population genetics at the University of Ferrara, Italy.