Talks of the Past Open Seminar: The evolution of linguistic diversity: the case of South America
Abstract
It has been observed many times that linguistic diversity is unevenly distributed over the globe. This is true for language diversity (e.g. Derungs et al. 2018; Hua et al. 2019), genealogical diversity (e.g. Gavin et al. 2013; Norder and Van Gijn 2026), and structural diversity (e.g. Dahl 2008; Skirgård et al. 2023). These non-randomly distributed patterns suggest that the factors that influence these distributions are likewise not randomly distributed.
Observations like these have led to a number of studies that try to model aspects of linguistic diversity on a global scale (e.g. Gavin et al. 2013; Hua et al. 2019), usually grounded in biophysical aspects of particular areas. Some of these models make predictions where diversity is expected to be high and where it would not be. While they are partly successful, they also often highlight significant deviations from their predictions in particular areas of the world. One of the areas that often defies expectations is South America. Research has shown that in studying these deviations on a smaller, regional scale, can offer insights into the specific socio-historical dynamics that underpin the observed patterns.
In this talk I will present an overview of the linguistic landscape of Indigenous South America, highlighting the ways in which it deviates from expectations about the distribution of linguistic diversity and discussing explanations that have been offered to resolve the apparent paradoxes, coming from different disciplines, including anthropology, geography, linguistics, and genetics. I will end with a more programmatic statement about potential directions to take from here, in order to better understand the relation between biophysical environment, human behavior, and linguistic diversity.
Seminar speaker: Rik van Gijn, a professor by special appointment of ethnolinguistic vitality and diversity in the world at the Centre for Linguistics, Leiden University, the Netherlands. His interests focus on the indigenous languages of South America, particularly the historical development of the region’s stunning linguistic diversity.