Areal Features and Linguistic Reconstruction

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Languages spoken in the same geographical area share linguistic features; similarities in vocabulary, grammar, and sound inventories are common. Two well-known mechanisms explain these geographically-defined similarities. The first mechanism is genetic relatedness; languages which have descended from a common ancestor tend to preserve aspects of the structure of their parent language. The second mechanism is language contact and diglossia among languages over large stretches of time. This second mechanism has resulted in a number of linguistic areas where language appear similar despite the absence of genetic relatedness. Well-known cases include the languages of the Balkans, Southeast Asia, and aboriginal languages of Australia. Yet not all cases of similarity between languages can be attributed to shared inheritance or contact. For example, in the African Sahel, stretching from Senegal to Ethiopia, is a large band of languages which can be identified as sharing very general linguistic despite clearly forming several distinct families of languages. The history of this region is deep and complex, stretching thousands of years into human prehistory. While there are proposals that the 1000+ languages spoken here can be grouped into just a few language families, several language families and regions remain problematic. For example, the Mande languages, whose speakers ruled a powerful West African empire for hundreds of years, are clearly grammatically and lexically distinct from the hundreds of languages that surround them. The proposed project funds an international conference bringing together leading scholars and students from across the world to tackle these difficult questions of language spread and change in Africa. Because the history are so complex and the languages so plentiful, disentangling the effects of inheritance and contact in Africa will form a major contribution to understanding how languages change and develop as well as deepening our understanding of the early history of humankind.