Language geography and the dynamics of linguistic and population prehistory

Introduction

The LANGUAGE REDUX project addresses the continuing challenge of understanding the processes that have shaped linguistic diversity. Aiming to push deeper into linguistic prehistory, the main questions it will be concerned with are:

• How did languages come to be distributed the way they are?
• Can we identify parts of the world where particularly old linguistic distributions are preserved?

Methodology

The project will harness tools from geography and macroecology to pursue a radically new, strongly data-driven approach to explore these questions. While historical linguistics has traditionally focused on language spread and language expansion, the LANGUAGE REDUX project will instead turn to the processes in which the range of languages is reduced before they are ultimately replaced by other languages.

REDUX Areas

It will explore the commonalities of the places in which languages survive later waves of language expansion longest – so-called REDUX areas. The project aims to derive an account of geographical factors that favor the conservation of old linguistic distributions from these areas.

Main Aim

The project’s main aim is to test the Geospatial Layering Hypothesis, which states that we can extrapolate from REDUX areas to identify those parts of the world that preserve earlier linguistic distributions, hosting deep lineages and typological structures that were once more common generally.

Significance

If confirmed, this would be a breakthrough in historical linguistics and open up perspectives on linguistic and population prehistory that are hitherto unavailable.

Research Framework

To explore this, the LANGUAGE REDUX project will establish a research framework in which:

1. Qualitative historical evidence on different time scales is engaged with spatial statistics.
2. Process-based quantitative modeling is utilized.
3. State-of-the-art typological methods are applied.

In addition, the framework will take into account genetic evidence as a proxy for demographic prehistory, thereby embedding the LANGUAGE REDUX project in an interdisciplinary research landscape on human prehistory.