Languages In the World (29 page)

Humans have been on the move since the beginning of time, and they have always taken with them their material cultures, their technologies, and their languages. In Part II, we surveyed some of the ways power circulates to organize and reorganize the social and political realities of various groups of people with respect to their languages, and we put emphasis on events in the last several centuries. In Part III, we now extend our purview to include the last 10,000 years and trace the paths of human movements around the world in near-prehistory. We then look at the consequences of the more recent crossings and recrossings of the globe through the last 3000 years of colonization. We address the effects of movement in terms of the kinds of things that can move:

1. People move. In Chapter 1, we suggested why people move: in search of the more plentiful berry bushes, the less crowded watering hole, the better mates. How they move also has effects. The humans who first left East Africa some 60 kya were hunter-gatherers. They went on foot and began to domesticate wolves, breeding them into dogs 18–12 kya. More recently, namely 1000 years ago, the Inuit were able to move eastward across the Canadian Arctic with their dog sleds and kayaks. In Chapter 7, we indicate some of the technological advances that made certain demic expansions possible, the domestication of large animals and agriculture being of prime importance. We return to the topic of historical reconstruction and introduce the philological principles behind the reconstruction of protolanguages. We then identify the homelands for the various language stocks along with their major structural characteristics. We end by reviewing models for representing how daughter languages diversify from the protolanguage.
   
2. Languages move. When the British first entered India in 1612, the merchants of the British East India Company set up shop in English. When the Raj ended in 1947, the British left behind their language deeply engrained in Indian daily life. Today, India is the call center for the world, because there are so many Indians who speak English either natively or near-natively. The idea here is that when colonization first takes place, the colonizers naturally have a physical presence; however, once colonization is under way or has even ended, the physical presence of the colonizers is not necessary in order to continue linguistic effects. In Chapter 8, we look at the way languages move around the world through colonialism with its administrative structures, military order, system of trade, laws, and cultural prestige. We end by considering the possibility that English is at the beginning of a process of becoming its own language family.
   
3. Weapons and money move, and with them borders. If you had been born in 1910 and lived your entire life in a town now called Uzhgorod, you would have begun life as a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and become, in succession, a citizen of the Republic of Czechoslovakia (1919), of Hungary (1938), and finally of Ukraine (1944). The language dynamics governing your social life would have been no less unsettling than those governing your political life. Chapter 9 takes up what happens to speakers and their languages as a result of geopolitical power struggles that create conflict and war, and new political realities. In modern times, many of these struggles have occurred when a colonial power decamps, and a postcolonial nation-state suddenly confronts its precolonial multilingual reality, with a minority group making a claim to a new border. Other times, namely during political or economic warfare, ethnogroups may find themselves moved by a government or displaced by an advancing army. At all times, these conflicts create not only physical pain and suffering but also psychosocial pain and suffering when an ethnogroup fails to create a new border, is inscribed by a new border, or is forced across a border. Geopolitical conflicts typically result in one group or another losing their social and political leverage, their language, their identity, or all three.
   

The movements of people and languages along with the fluctuations of geopolitics have created our modern world, for better or worse. These movements are at every moment implicated in the accompanying circulation of goods and services, and mediums of exchange. To put it another way, we can say that language, money, and markets constitute extended traditions, whose interlacing, once stabilized in time and place, can become recognized as a culture. The movement of people in and out of Europe provided Italian cooks with the ingredients for their quintessential dish
pasta pomodoro
, which is a happy combination of the tomato from North America and pasta from North Africa. Less happy circumstances occur, and unwanted disruptions to these extended traditions can cause trauma. Desired disruptions create new cultural forms. Students from around the world converge every August on the campus of Duke University. They come with their own sense of style, which is remade and displayed by the end of the first semester by means of Duke-labeled sweatpants, hoodies, and T-shirts. College campuses are furthermore hot houses of slang and the latest speak, which their mobile student bodies take and text out into the world.

The precolonial Polynesians revered a supreme deity who, according to the story, huddled in an egg-shaped shell for countless ages in endless space. After an infinite period of impenetrable darkness, the god hatched himself. Upon beholding a void, he was inspired to create the heavens and the earth, and all the other gods. This deity also brought forth the seas and the islands. Once land was formed, the creator of the universe sent a vine to earth, and from the worms clinging to this vine, humans developed. The Samoans called this god Tagaloa, the Tongans called him Tangaloa, the Māori of New Zealand called him Tangaroa, the Tahitians called him Ta'aroa, and the Hawaiians called him Kanaloa. What is most interesting about this story from a linguistic
point of view is that the name for this god could well serve comparative philologists in telling another origin story, that of the Austronesian languages. The various names for the supreme deity in these five Pacific languages – Samoan, Tongan, Māori, Tahitian, and Hawaiian – can start the process of reconstructing Proto-Austronesian.

In this chapter, we explore in more depth the methods of comparative philology (historical linguistics) mentioned in Chapter 3, and we summarize the fruits of this philological labor that has established the major language stocks, identified the diverse homelands where the protolanguages were likely spoken, and catalogued their major structural features. We also engage with another group of scientists interested in origin stories, namely population geneticists who seek to establish the genetic relationships among the world's populations. Whereas comparative philology has been around for well over 200 years, population genetics is hardly more than 50 years old. However, the latter has made great progress, especially since the Human Genome Project finished mapping the complete human genome in 2003.
²
It is exciting to discover the places where the results of these two independent disciplines – comparative philology and population genetics – coincide to indicate places where the genetic make-up of certain populations and the languages they speak separate and diverge. These places of coincidence are the topic of this chapter, for they tell us the story of the spread of the peoples and their languages across the globe during the last 10,000 years.

The contemporary student of linguistics – the contemporary student of almost any field – needs at least a passing knowledge of both genetics and evolution. We will take up the topic of evolution in Chapter 10. Here, we sketch the basics of genetics and its relationship to the discipline of linguistics.

A
gene
(
Figure 7.1
)
³
is defined as a basic unit of molecular inheritance. Physically, a gene is a particular sequence of a combination of four organic molecules called nucleotides – A (adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine), and T (thymine) – that form base pairs, such as G–C and A–T, and these pairs are the building blocks of DNA. Functionally, a gene is a unit that codes for a particular protein. The entirety of an organism's basic physical hereditary material is called a
genome
. The human genome has between 20,000 and 25,000 protein-coding genes, a good 50 times fewer than the genome of the organism with the largest known genome, the rare
Paris japonica
, a flower native to Japan, and a whopping 1300 times larger than the genome of the organism with the smallest known genome,
Encephalitozoon intestinalis
, a parasite of humans and other mammals. Some genes are famous. In 2013, Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie's preemptive double mastectomy brought a spotlight on
BRCA
(pronounced ‘brocka') whose mutated variants correlate highly with breast cancer of the kind that killed Jolie's mother at a relatively early age.

A gene is found on a
chromosome
, which is an organized structure of DNA found in cells, mostly in the nucleus. In humans, the genes are spread across 23 pairs of chromosomes, thus giving humans 46 chromosomes per cell. The chromosome pairs cross in a way to create a high-waisted X and thereby create two long arms and two
short arms for each pair. Perhaps the most well-known pair of chromosomes is chromosome 23, which determines sex: XY for male and XX for female. Genetic mutations can occur in many places, including on the sex chromosomes, and there is a condition known as
Fragile X
that results from mutations in one or more genes on the X chromosome causing a range of nontypical development in both boys and girls. Chromosomal abnormalities can occur, as well, such as Trisomy 21 or Down Syndrome, which results when all or part of chromosome 21 has a third copy.

An
allele
(Greek
allo
‘other') is an alternate form of a gene or a group of genes in close proximity on a chromosome, and these variants account for the individual
phenotype
of an organism, its particular set of characteristics, many of which are observable. Once a group of organisms has been classed into a species, that is, once it is determined that the members of this group share a
genotype
, the next thing to notice is that the members of this group are all different one from the other – physically, biochemically, behaviorally – which is to say they all have different phenotypes. One of the reasons for these phenotypic differences is genetic variation. Variations in hair, eye, and skin color are commonly observable differences among humans, and these variations are attributable to specific alleles. Susceptibility to certain diseases, as has just been noted, can also be due to specific alleles. The genes
BRCA 1
and
2
, which are found on the long arms of chromosomes 17 and 13, are not breast cancer genes in and of themselves. Only their mutated alleles are associated with the manifestation of the disease.

By comparing and contrasting genetic variations, population geneticists can distinguish among groups and subgroups of populations, just as philologists compare and contrast cognate sets in order to identify language families (groups) and branches (subgroups). A
haplogroup
(Greek
haplo
‘single, simple') is a group of similar
haplotypes
that share a common ancestor having the same single nucleotide – A, C, G, or T – variation in all haplotypes. For instance, in comparing stretches of DNA samples of different groups, if Strand 1 has the sequence
C
–
G
T–A A–T at the very location where Strand 2 has the sequence
T
–
A
T–A A–T, this then qualifies as a SNP (pronounced ‘snip'), a single nucleotide polymorphism (variation) with two alleles, C–G and T–A. These two haplotypes belong to the same haplogroup. There is a parallel here, once again, with the philologists' sound correspondences, which help determine where the branching points are in the groups and subgroups of languages.
⁴
Haplogrouping is often called
deep ancestry
and can be used to trace lineages much farther back in time than can philologists' linguistic reconstructions, which do not apply at a time-depth much greater than 10,000 years.

The haplogroups studied in human populations often involve the Y-chromosome (
Y-DNA
), which is passed along solely in the patrilineal line from father to son, and mitochondrial DNA (
mtDNA
), which is passed from the mother to all offspring. Unlike nuclear DNA, which is found in the nucleus of a cell, mtDNA is found outside the nucleus in a cellular organelle called the mitochondrion. MtDNA does not recombine; there is no shuffling of genes from one generation to the next, as there is with nuclear genes. For this reason, and because the rate of mutation of mtDNA was thought to be statistically regular, mtDNA was once considered to function as a molecular clock and used to date divergences in populations. However, this chronological reliability has proven to be an oversimplification. Nevertheless, it seems to be the case that all men today belong to one of 18 main Y-DNA haplogroups on their paternal line and one of 26 main mtDNA haplogroups on their maternal line.

Into the story of human dispersal now comes a 100-year-old lock of hair. It came from an aboriginal man living in a remote corner of southwestern Australia. He gave it to Alfred Cort Hadden, a British anthropologist who traveled the world in the early twentieth century, seeking samples of hair, among other exotica.
⁵
The hair sample lay in a museum drawer until 2011 when an international team of geneticists mapped it and identified 2,782,401 SNPs, of which 449,115 were considered high-confidence. The age of the sample is important because the man was born before aboriginals mixed with Europeans, and indeed the team found no genetic evidence of European mixture. These results were then compared with other major SNP studies of African, European, and Asian populations in order to help to sort out the details of the human dispersal from Africa. The leading model had once been that all Asians arose from a single migration of modern humans. Now, it has become clear(er) that there were two dispersals, a first one ∼62–75 kya that led to Australia ∼50 kya and a second one separating East Asians from Europeans ∼25–38 kya, after which came the Asian split with Native American ancestors ∼15–30 kya.

When the species
Homo sapiens sapiens
left Africa and began to roam the globe in what can be called Globalization 1.0, they were sure to encounter at least two sets of now-extinct cousins, the Neanderthals
⁶
and the Denisovians, a subspecies of
Homo sapiens
. The Neanderthals left Africa for Eurasia perhaps as long ago as 300 kya. The
Denisovians of West Asia, a newly discovered sister species to the Neanderthal, might have left not long thereafter. We modern humans – ever curious about such things – have long wondered whether our ancestors interbred with other ancient populations. Recent genomic comparisons say they did, with estimates suggesting that the Neanderthal contributed 1–4% to modern Eurasian genomes and the Denisovians 4–6% to modern Oceanic (Melanesian and aboriginal Australian) genomes. These analyses are the results of comparing a particular human leukocyte antigen (HLA) – vital in immune defense and reproduction and therefore critical for human survival – with that found in the Neanderthal and the Denisovian genome with their archaic HLA haplotypes carrying particular alleles. One of these ancient alleles was acquired by humans as they traveled through West Asia, likely around 50 kya. Whatever the impetus for the interbreeding, the result was a good one for humans: there was an advantage for these small migrating groups to mix and mingle with folk whose immune systems were better adapted to local pathogens.

We are now prepared to refine our story of the Austronesians. First, we follow a second dispersal of humans who make their way out of Africa and arrive over the millennia in what is now China. Then we identify a particular group – let's call them the
pre-Proto-Austronesians
 – who settle for a time, perhaps to the south of Hangzhou Bay on the East China Sea, not far from modern-day Shanghai. Their culture is Neolithic (New Stone Age). Around 6 kya, all or part of this population sails south to an island now known as Taiwan where they encounter a culture that is Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) and replace it. The period of the development of the language of these people on their homeland of Taiwan would be considered to be Proto-Austronesian. At this point, the comparative philologist draws a line separating this group of Austronesian speakers from other groups in the region. The breakup of this new language family begins around 4 kya when Austronesian speakers begin colonizing the northern Philippines.

The next step is to determine what languages can properly be classed under the family heading Austronesian. Or, rather, it is the case that the heading
Austronesian
is a post-hoc label the philologist attaches to a group of languages whose protolanguage can be reconstructed with confidence. The first branching of Austronesian is between Formosan
⁷
and Malayo-Polynesian. Formosan languages are spoken in Taiwan and a few surrounding islands, and are presently in the minority in Taiwan where the majority languages are Taiwanese Mandarin and Mandarin. The Malayo-Polynesian languages are all the rest, and these stretch across a geographic range second in vastness only to that of the current range of the Indo-European languages. In the case of the Malayo-Polynesian languages, however, most of the area is covered by water. Malayo-Polynesian languages can be found, on the far western (Malayo-) end, on Madagascar in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa and, on the far eastern (Polynesian) end, on Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean whose nearest continental point is Chile in South America. One of the major languages in this branch is Malay (Bahasa Indonesian), and it is spoken in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, and Thailand.

The Polynesians were the first human inhabitants of the far-flung mid-Pacific islands and the most daring deep-sea voyagers and explorers the world has ever known. In double-hulled ships fashioned from stone tools, they settled every habitable island in
the vast expanse between Hawaii on the north, New Zealand on the south, Easter Island on the east, and Tonga and Samoa on the west. It is likely they even made it all the way to the coast of Peru. When Spanish sailors first visited the islands in the sixteenth century, they discovered that the Polynesians had the sweet potato. This vegetable is apparently native only to the Western Hemisphere, and it was an important food crop in Peru when the Spanish conquered the Incas. No Native Americans had seagoing ships capable of a voyage to Polynesia. Thus, the sweet potato in Polynesia must have been obtained from Peru, and there is linguistic evidence to that effect: the Peruvians call the plant
kumar
, while the universal Polynesian name is
kumara
(Wexler 1943:35). In exchange, the Polynesians gave the South Americans chickens.

As for the western settlements of the skilled seafaring Austronesians, there is some disagreement whether they spread their language by primarily inhabiting empty spaces or whether they mixed with local populations who absorbed their forms of speech. However, if the Austronesians did encounter local populations in their western settlements of Island Southeast Asia, it is likely that these were Paleolithic, like the indigenous population the Austronesians encountered in Taiwan. As for the branch of the languages of the eastern settlements, sometimes called Oceanic or Polynesian, it is clear: the islands were previously uninhabited, with Samoa and Tonga settled around 1500 BCE, New Zealand around 1200 CE, and Tahiti and the Hawaiian Islands around 500 CE.

What route ancient populations took out of Africa and which populations they absorbed (or did not absorb) along their way is a question to be answered by population genetics. Determining the relationship among the languages these dispersing people spoke is the job of comparative philology. Among nonmigrating traditional peoples and cultures, such as some of those found in southern Africa, a relatively stable degree of coincidence between genetic group and linguistic group is expected.
⁸
The Austronesians form a middle ground: in the east, there is a coincidence of genetic group and linguistic group because they populated previously uninhabited islands; in the west, there might be less coincidence. For modern mobile populations, the situation is completely different, and the coincidence of the genetic group and the linguistic group is likely to be small. Large numbers of modern speakers of English worldwide, for instance, have little or no direct genetic connection to the West Germanic tribes of the Angles and the Saxons who settled England in the fifth century. Similarly, speakers of Romance languages worldwide need have no genetic connection to the ancestral Celts and Dacians who were in Western Europe before the Roman Empire, just as the Celts and Dacians had little genetic connection to the Romans whose language they adopted.