urheimat - wikipedia, the f

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UrheimatFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Dravidian homeland)

Urheimat(/rhamt/; German pronunciation:[u hamat] ; a German compound of Ur-"primitive,original" andHeimat"home, homeland") is a linguistic term that denotes the homeland of the speakers of a

proto-language. A proto-language is a reconstruction of a hypothetical parent language in the tree model oflanguage evolution. As the placement of branches is often uncertain, the time, location, and very existenceof an urheimat is also often uncertain. However, it is possible to have considerable confidence regarding thelocation of an urheimat of a language or language family from multiple lines of linguistic, genetic andarchaeological evidence, even when the precise contours of a proto-language are not firmly established.

Archaeological evidence is sometimes adduced to support the existence of an urheimat. In the 19th centuryand the first half of the 20th century, the prevailing belief was that languages could be reliably associatedwith archaeological cultures. This culture history theory, developed by Gustaf Kossinna, formalized the

presumption that unified ethnicities, such as peoples or tribes, could be associated with archaeologicalcultures. One might point to a culture map and hazard a guess as to which language, typically a proto-

language, was spoken in each culture.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, the link between archaeological cultures and language boundarieswas weakened by the discovery of cases in which language shifts occurred with only minor differences incultural artifacts. This article summarizes some of the leading, and sometimes competing, urheimat proposalsfor some of the larger or more carefully studied language families.

Contents

1 Language families predominantly found in Europe, North Asia and South Asia

1.1 Indo-European homelands

1.2 Dravidian homeland

1.3 Uralic homeland

1.4 Turkic homeland

1.5 Yeniseian

1.6 Other groups

2 Language families predominantly found in Africa and Southwest Asia

2.1 Khoisan homeland

2.2 Afro-Asiatic homeland

2.3 Nilo-Saharan homeland

2.4 NigerCongo homeland

2.5 Malagasy language homeland

3 Language families predominantly found in East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania

3.1 Sino-Tibetan homeland

3.2 Austroasiatic homeland3.3 HmongMien homeland

3.4 Austronesian homeland

eimat- Wikipedia, thefreeencyclopedia http:/ / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Dravidian_homeland#Dravidian_homeland

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3.5 TaiKadai homeland

3.6 Mongolic homeland

3.7 Japanese and Korean language homelands

3.8 Other groups

4 Languages spoken predominantly in North and South America

4.1 Na-Dene4.2 Eskimo-Aleut

4.3 Uto-Aztecan

4.4 Tupian

4.5 Other groups

5 Implications of current research

6 Limitations of the concept of Urheimat

6.1 Creoles

6.2 Isolates6.3 Shared urheimats

7 See also

8 Footnotes

9 References

Language families predominantly found in Europe, North Asia and

South Asia

Indo-European homelands

Proto-Indo-European homeland

Early efforts to identify the homeland of the Proto-Indo-European language speakers focused on thepresence or absence of geographical indicator words. For example, such words as beechand salmonindicated a location within the range of those genera in the north temperate zone. The word for "ocean" wasmissing, suggesting an inland location. Words that did not fit this geographical location, such as lion, could

be explained by more recent borrowings.

Many hypotheses for an Urheimat have been proposed. Mallory said,[1]"One does not ask 'where is theIndo-European homeland?' but rather 'where do they put it now?'" He also states that current discussion of

the Indo-European homeland problem is largely confined to four basic models, with variations: [2]

The Baltic-Pontic(-Caspian) region in the Mesolithic. The Funnel beaker culture, the Globular

Amphora culture, and the Corded Ware culture are possible archaeological representatives of the

proto-language speakers, in this theory as it is commonly expressed.

1.

Anatolia: Early Neolithic, 7000-6000 BC. Not only is there no supporting archaeology, but

archaeology and word archaeology are to the contrary.

2.

Central Europe-Balkans: Early Neolithic, c. 5000 BC. At least part of the Linear Pottery Culture is3.




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within the range.

Pontic-Caspian: Eneolithic, c. 4500-3000 BC. Typically the collection of similar cultures called the

Kurgan culture are presented as supporting the reconstructed Indo-European customs.

4.

Other, less accepted models select the Indian subcontinent:

Indian Urheimat Theory1.

Indigenous Aryans Theory2.

Some minor hypotheses are:

The Armenian hypothesis was suggested by Soviet scholars in the 1980s1.

the Paleolithic Continuity Theory was suggested by Italian "paleolinguist" Mario Alinei in the 1990s.2.

Earlier Indo-European phylogenies featured an initial split into Centum and Satem languages, a distinctionformally based on the word for the number one hundred in each group's supposed proto-language. Today,

one phonetic character is hardly enough to define a proto-language. Furthermore, languages studied better ordiscovered subsequently (including Armenian, the extinct Anatolian languages such as Hittite and the extinctTocharian language of the Tarim basin of Asia) were not compatible with any such genetic distinction.Instead, the former shared innovation became the Centum Satem isogloss, which did not have to conform tolanguage boundaries or represent any major change of language. It produced dialects instead.

Proto-Anatolian homeland

Proto-Anatolian was the parent language of the Anatolian languages, which are attested only by inscriptionsfound in Anatolia and a few exports. It is the only group to feature an explicit remnant of the laryngeals,

sounds that disappeared in late Proto-Indo-European. It is therefore identified as the first branch,chronologically, which means that the ancestral Proto-Anatolians were first to become isolated from theIndo-European speech community.

Of the two ways separation could have occurred, the model of an entry into Anatolia from the north prevails.Indo-European culture featured horses. They were at first hunted and then domesticated on the plains ofAsia, not in Anatolia. The other alternative, that all the other Indo-Europeans left Anatolia, leaving a

population behind, does not account for the presence of a Hattic interface in Anatolian, but in none of theothers.

That same Hattic interface suggests that Anatolia was not entirely the place where Proto-Anatolian formed,

but rather the latter encountered the substrate on entering Anatolia and adjusted itself accordingly. Theconcept of Indo-Hittite fits a Proto-Anatolian outside of Anatolia, but it was used primarily to refer to anearly stage of Proto-Indo-European, before the first separation. Anthony therefore narrows the meaning ofProto-Anatolian to "the language that was immediately ancestral to the three known daughter languages that

entered Anatolia as Pre-Anatolian."[3]He defines the language phases between Proto-Indo-European andProto-Anatolian as Pre-Anatolian.

Proto-Tocharian homeland

Proto-Italo-Celtic homeland

A likely candidate for the homeland of an Italo-Celtic proto-language or dialect continuum is the Urnfieldculture and its predecessor, the Tumulus culture of Central Europe (1600 BC).




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Proto-Italic homeland

Candidates for the first introduction of Proto-Italic speakers to Italy are the Terramare culture (1500 BC) orthe Villanovan culture (1100 BC), although the latter is now usually identified with the non-Italic (indeed,non-Indo-European) Etruscan civilisation.

The Romance languages are all derivative of Latin, a member of this Indo-European language subfamily,which was the common language of the Western Roman Empire that had its roots in Italic dialect spoken inand around the capital, Rome, until the empire collapsed in the 5th century CE.

Proto-Celtic homeland

The Proto-Celtic homeland is usually located in the Early Iron Age Hallstatt culture of northern Austria.There is a broad consensus that the center of the La Tne culture lay on the northwest edges of the Hallstattculture. Pre-La Tne (6th to 5th century BC) Celtic expansions reached Great Britain and Ireland (InsularCeltic) and Gaul. La Tne groups expanded in the 4th century BC to Iberia, the Po Valley, the Balkans, andeven as far as Galatia in Asia Minor, in the course of several major migrations.

Albanian homeland

The history of the Daco-Thracian/Thraco-Illyrian dialects of the Balkans is obscure, in part, because thewritten record of these languages is fragmentary. One of these languages may have been the language thatevolved into the modern Albanian language.

Proto-Germanic homeland

Pre-Germanic cultures were the bearers of the Nordic Bronze Age. Proto-Germanic proper is hypothesized

by some to have developed in the Jastorf culture of the Pre-Roman Iron Age.[4]




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Map of the Nordic Bronze Age

culture, c. 1200 BC

Approximate extent of the Corded Ware horizon with

adjacent 3rd millennium cultures (after EIEC).

Proto-Greek homeland

The Phrygian, Macedonian, and Greek proto-languages likely alsooriginate in the Balkans.

Armenian homeland

Proto-Armenian may also be Balkans (Greco-Phrygian) derived, or atleast strongly influenced by a Phrygian substrate. The Phrygianinfluence on [pre-]Proto-Armenian would date to about the 7th centuryBC, in the context of the declining kingdom of Urartu.

Proto-Balto-Slavic homeland

The Balto-Slavic homeland largely corresponds to thehistorical distribution of Baltic and Slavic.

Proto-Baltic homeland

Proto-Baltic likely emerging in the eastern parts of theCorded Ware horizon.

Proto-Slavic homeland

The Slavic languages experience a major expansionstarting around the 6th century CE, in some casessupplanting earlier Indo-European languages in the

region to which they expanded.The Slavic homeland likely corresponds to the distribution of the oldest recognisably Slavic hydronyms,found in northern and western Ukraine and southern Belarus.

Proto-Indo-Iranian homeland

The Proto-Indo-Iranians are widely identified with the bearers of the Andronovo horizon of the late 3rd andearly 2nd millennia BC, with the various languages of the Indo-Iranian language family starting todifferentiate from Proto-Indo-Iranian around 2000 BCE.

There are three language families within the Indo-Iranian language family that derived from the Proto-Indo-Iranian language: the Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and other Indo-Europeanlanguages of South Asia; the Iranian languages, e.g. Persian, Kurdish and Pashto of West Asia and CentralAsia; and the Nuristani languages spoken in eastern Afghanistan.

The Indo-Aryan languages are all descendants of the Sanskrit language, which it at least as old as 1500 BCE,where Indo-Aryan linguistic features were historically attested by the Hittites in the Mittani language ofWestern Iran, and was a single Old Aryan language as recently as the 4th century BCE, when it wasstandardized in written form. Some scholars associate the Cemetery H culture of the Northern Indus RiverValley (specifically Western Punjab) ca. 1900 BCE with the original Indo-Aryan population of South Asia.

The community that originally spoke the Sanskrit language is also called the Vedic civiliation after theirsemi-legendary account of their community found in Hindu scriptures called the Vedas during the Vedicperiod from ca. 1700 BCE to ca. 320 BCE. The archaeological cultures in South Asia described as Black andRed Ware (10th century BCE) and the later Painted Gray Ware (starting ca. 900 BCE) and subsequently the

Northern Black Polished Ware (ca. 500 BCE) are all commonly associated with the Sanskrit language




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Modern Dravidian languages

speaking Indo-Aryans during the Vedic period.

The Iranian languages split into Eastern and Western branches in what are known as the Middle Iranianlanguages around the 4th century BCE. The Iranian Avestan language of Zoroastrian scripture is committedto writing at about this point but was in existence and historically attested long before a script was devisedfor it. The Median language was the language of the Median empire of western and central Iran (ca. 700559BC). The language of the Scythian people of Central Asia, whose interactions with the Greeks in 512 BCEwere attested by Herodotus ca. 440 BCE, was also an Iranian language.

There is some dispute over whether the Dardic languages (spoken in northern Pakistan, eastern Afghanistan,and the Indian region of Jammu and Kashmir, most prominently the Kashmiri language) are Indo-Aryan,Iranian or part of the Nurustani languages. This issue of classification is clouded by the nationalisticimplications of such a classification for the political affiliations of the contested Kashmir region of SouthAsia and by the fact that the Dardic languages are spoken in an area that borders the region where each ofthe other Indo-Iranian language families is spoken.

Dravidian homeland

The Dravidian languages have been found mainly in South Indiasince at least the second century BCE (inscriptions, ed. I. Mahadevan2003). It is, however, a widely held hypothesis that Dravidianspeakers may have been more widespread throughout India,

including the northwest region,[5]before the arrival ofIndo-European speakers. A map showing where Dravidian languagesare spoken today appears to the right.

Historical records suggest that the South Dravidian language grouphad separated from a Proto-Dravidian language no later than 700

BCE, linguistic evidence suggests that they probably becamedistinctive around 1,100 BCE,[6]and some scholars using linguisticmethods put the deepest divisions in the language group at roughly3,000 BCE. Russian linguist M.S. Andronov puts the split betweenTamil (a written Southern Dravidian language) and Telugu (a written

Central Dravidian language) between 1,500 BCE and 1,000 BCE.[7]

Southworth identifies late Proto-Dravidian with the Southern Neolithic culture in the lower Godavari Riverbasin of South Central India, which first appeared ca. 2,500 BCE, based upon its agricultural vocabulary,while noting that this "would not preclude the possibility that speakers of an earlier stage of Dravidian

entered the subcontinent from western or central Asia, as has often been suggested."[8]

Speculations regarding the original homeland have centered on the Indus Valley Civilization or on Elam(whose Elamite language was spoken in the hills to the east of the ancient Sumerian civilization with whomthe Indus Valley Civilization traded and shared domesticated species) in an Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis, butresults have not been convincing. The possibility that the language family is indigenous to the Dravidian areaand is a truly isolated genetic unit has also not been ruled out.

Prof. Asko Parpola (University of Helsinki), the Jesuit priest Father Heras in the 1930s and other scholars(such as Indian and early Tamil expert Iravatham Mahadevan and Prof. Walter A. Fairservis Jr.) concludethat the Indus sign system represented an ancient Dravidian language, a view that they assume is supported

by Tamil artifacts discovered in 2006.[9]Thus, in Parpola's view, the urheimat of Dravidian would be in theIndus River Valley. However, Harvard Indologist Michael Witzel takes the viewthat has received seriousacademic consideration (ca. 2004)which is critical of an Indus Valley Civilization Dravidian homeland andof the widely held view that the inscriptions of the Indus Valley Civilization even constitute a written




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Neolithic period

language.[10]In the essay "Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan" (with RV in this context referring toRigvedic, i.e. Indo-Aryan), Witzel says "As we can no longer reckon with Dravidian influence on the earlyRV, this means that the language of the pre-Rigvedic Indus civilization, at least in the Panjab, was of (Para-)Austroasiatic nature." There are no written examples of Austroasiatic languages being spoken further westthan Central India during the recent historical era (i.e., in the era for which we have written records).

Recent studies of the distribution of alleles on the Y chromosome,[11]microsatellite DNA,[12]and

mitochondrial DNA[13]in India have cast doubt for a biological Dravidian "race" distinct fromnon-Dravidians in the Indian subcontinent;[14]other recent genetic studies have found evidence of Aryan,

Dravidian and pre-Dravidian (original Asian) strata in South Asian populations.[15]Geneticist Luigi LucaCavalli-Sforza proposes that a Dravidian people were preceded in India by Austroasiatic people, and were

present prior to the arrival of Indo-Aryan language speakers in India.[16]

Uralic homeland

The Uralic homeland is unknown. A

possible locus is the Comb CeramicCulture of ca4200 ca2000 BC (shownon the map to the right). This issuggested by the high language diversityaround the middle Volga River, wherethree highly distinct branches of theUralic family, Mordvinic, Mari, andPermic, are located. Reconstructed plantand animal names (including spruce,Siberian pine, Siberian Fir, Siberian larch,

brittle willow, elm, and hedgehog) areconsistent with this location. This isadjacent to the proposed homeland forProto-Indo-European under the Kurganhypothesis.

French anthropologist Bernard Sergent,

inLa Gense de l'Inde(1997),[17]arguedthat Finno-Ugric (Uralic) may have agenetic source or have borrowedsignificantly from proto-Dravidian or a predecessor language of West African origins. Some linguists see

Uralic (Hungarian, Finnish) as having a linguistic relationship to both Altaic (Turkic, Mongol) languagegroups[18](as in the outdated Ural-Altaic hypothesis) and Dravidian languages. The theory that theDravidian languages display similarities with the Uralic language group, suggesting a prolonged period of

contact in the past,[19]is popular amongst Dravidian linguists and has been supported by a number of

scholars, including Robert Caldwell,[20]Thomas Burrow,[21]Kamil Zvelebil,[22]and Mikhail Andronov.[23]

This theory has, however, been rejected by some specialists in Uralic languages, [24]and has in recent times

also been criticised by other Dravidian linguists like the late Bhadriraju Krishnamurti.[25]

As noted below, many notable linguists have proposed that the Eskimo-Aleut languages and Uralic languages

have a common origin, although there is no consensus that this connection is genuine.

Turkic homeland




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The Countries and autonomous regions where a

Turkic language has official status.

There is considerable dispute over the time and place oforigin of the Turkic languages, but it is undisputed thattheir origins are not in or near the countries named afterthe language group, Turkey, a.k.a. Anatolia, andTurkmenistan. The people of Anatolia spokeIndo-European language family languages from at leastthe time of the Hittite Empire (whose expansion to most

of Anatolia started ca. 2000 BCE), which is the earliestevidence of Indo-European languages in the regionattested historically (some non-Indo-European languageswere spoken in at least some parts of Anatolia for some

substantial periods of time prior to the Hittite empire) until the Persian Sassanid Empire collapsed in 651 CE.

The Turkic languages are now spoken in Turkey, Central Asia and Siberia. The Turkic peoples originated in"the Far East including North China, especially Xinjiang Province and Inner Mongolia with parts ofMongolia and Siberia possibly as far west as Lake Baikal and the Altai Mountains. They may have beenamong the peoples of the multi-ethnic historical Saka known as early as the Greek writer Herodotus.Certainly identified Turkic tribes were known by the 6th century and, by the 10th century, most of Central

Asia, formerly dominated by Iranian peoples, was settled by Turkic tribes. The Seljuk Turks from the 11thcentury invaded Anatolia, ultimately resulting in permanent Turkic settlement there and the establishment ofthe nation of Turkey."

The first possibly Turkic peoples to arrive in Europe were the Huns, who were at war with the RomanEmpire in the 4th century CE. Confusingly, the Hungarian language is not a Turkic language (it is a Uraliclanguage related to languages like the Finnish language and Estonian language) and was not spoken by theHuns.

Prior to the Turkic migration, Indo-European languages were spoken in Anatolia and Central Asia as far asthe Tarim Basin.

The inferred population genetic contributions of Turkic populations show a cline from a high point in the

East to the a low point in the West.[26]In Turkey, the Turkic contribution to the local population genetic mix

is about 30%.[27]

The origin of Turkic languages is disputed, both in connection with other language families and in time andplace. The lack of written records prior to the earliest Chinese accounts, and the fact that the early Turkicpeoples were nomadic pastoralists, and hence mobile, makes localizing and dating the earliest homeland ofthe Turkic language difficult. Attempts to localize the proto-Turkic Urheimat are usually connected with the

early archaeological horizon of west and central Siberia and in the region south of it.

[28]

Further attemptsalso include the Botai culture and the cultural horizon of the Kurgan cultures (see: Paleolithic ContinuityTheory).

Yeniseian

The Yeniseian language family has been recently tied by linguist Edward Vajda to the Native American

Na-Dene languages of North American (e.g. Navajo),[29]in a proposal named Dene-Yeniseian. Severalwell-known linguists have reviewed the hypothesis as favorable, although several linguists, such as LyleCampbell, still reject it. This family of languages is sometimes described as Paleosiberian, a classification

that rests on a belief that it represents a stratum of Siberian populations that preceded the speakers of theother modern languages of Siberia (mostly of the Indo-European and Altaic language families), possibly onethat dates back to the Paleolithic era when North America was initially populated. However, Paleosiberianis usually considered a negatively defined collective term of convenience, not a genetic nor even arealgrouping, similarly to Papuan. There is some evidence that the speakers of the Yeniseian languages (such as




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the Ket language, which is the only surviving member of the moribund language family) migrated to theircurrent homeland along the Yenisei River in Central Siberia from an area south of the Altai Mountains in thegeneral vicinity of Mongolia or Northwest China within the last 2500 years or so (although there is no

evidence that the Yeniseian languages are linguistically related to the Altaic languages).[30][31][32]Onesentence of the language of the Jie, a Xiongnu tribe who founded the Later Zhao state in Chinese history,appears consistent with being a Yeniseian language. Other linguists have suggested, with far less widespreadacceptance in the linguistics community, that the Yeniseian languages have a genetic relationship to one or

more of the Caucasian languages and the Sino-Tibetan languages (such as Chinese).[33][34]

Other groups

The only languages which are predominantly found in Europe, North Asia and South Asia and are not part ofthe language families above are the Basque language spoken in Northern Spain and Southwestern France,the three living language families of the Caucasus mountains (Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasianand South Caucasian, with the first two sometimes proposed as members of a single North Caucasianlanguage family), the Paleosiberian languages (the Yukaghir languages of Central Siberia (viewed by some

linguists as a divergent branch of the Uralic languages),[35][36]and the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages of

Eastern Siberia, a grouping which sometimes includes the geographically adjacent Nivkh language, althoughit is sometimes treated as a language isolate, and Yenesian), and a few South Asian linguistic isolates, such asBurushaski, spoken mostly in isolated pockets of Northern Pakistan, and the two indigenous languagefamilies of the Andamanese people (Great Andamanese and Ongan), and perhaps Nihali (spoken in West

Central India).[37]In each of these cases, the languages are spoken in an area that is geographically compact,were spoken in that area at the time that they were first attested historically, and there is no definitiveevidence of an origin for the languages in question outside the area where they are spoken now.

Joseph Greenberg and Stephen Wurm have both noted lexical similarities between the Great Andamaneselanguage and the West Papuan languages. Wurm noted that the lexical similarities "are quite striking and

amount to virtual formal identity [...] in a number of instances." There is no agreement, even between thesetwo linguists, on a narrative that gave rise to these similarities.

Michael Fortescue, a specialist in EskimoAleut as well as in Chukotko-Kamchatkan, argues for a linkbetween Uralic, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, and EskimoAleut inLanguage Relations Across BeringStrait(1998). He calls this proposed grouping Uralo-Siberian.

There have been determined efforts by multiple linguists from at least the 19th century to link theselanguages to other language families, particularly in the case of the Basque language, where numerousconnections to language families living and dead have been proposed by linguists. Frequently, efforts to lookfor deeper linguistic origins of these languages will also attempt to integrate them into attested extinct

languages of Europe, such as the Etruscan language of Northern Italy, the Ligurian language of Italy, theLemnian language of the Aegean Island of Lemnos, the Minoan language aka Linear A of ancient Crete, theSumerian language once spoken in Mesopotamia (which is the oldest attested written language), the languageof the Indus River Valley civilization, the Elamite language of Iran, and the Hurrian language and Hatticlanguage of Anatolia. None of these efforts has achieved wide support among linguists, although some have

been viewed as sufficiently credible to receive serious consideration from multiple linguists.[37][38][39][40]

[41][42]

Language families predominantly found in Africa and Southwest

Asia




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Map showing the distribution of the major language

families represented in Africa.

Khoisan homeland

The Khoisan click languages of Africa do not form alanguage family and so do not, as a family, have ahomeland. However, limited genetic evidence from someKhoisan-language speakers in southern Africa suggest anorigin "along the African rift and a possible wider East

African range."[43]Thus, the Bushmen of the Kalahariwho occupy the largest geographic region where clicklanguages are spoken are viewed as a relict populationfar removed from the place where click languages

probably originated. The Khoe languages, Tuulanguages, Kx'a languages, Hadza language and Sandawelanguage (the latter two being Tanzanian languageisolates) are frequently grouped together in the catch allKhoisan categorization, despite the lack of a definitiverecent common origin of these languages in a common

language family. However, for the Khoe-Kwadi group, amore recent origin by immigration from East Africa(around the beginning of the Christian Era) has beensuggested by Tom Gldemann, based on his observationof similarities with Sandawe.

Afro-Asiatic homeland

The Afro-Asiatic languages include Arabic, Hebrew, Berber, and a variety of other languages now foundmostly in Northeast Africa, although the exact boundaries of this language family are disputed in the case ofa small number of languages spoken by small numbers of individuals in a few localized areas of Sudan andEast Africa.

The limited area of the Afro-Asiatic Sprachraum (prior to its expansion to new areas in the historic era) haslimited the potential areas where that family's Urheimat could be. Generally speaking, two proposals have

been developed: that Afro-Asiatic arose in a Semitic Urheimat in the Middle East aka Southwest Asia, orthat Afro-Asiatic languages arose in northeast Africa (generally, either between Darfur and Tibesti or inEthiopia and the other countries of the Horn of Africa). The African hypothesis is considered to be rathermore likely at the present time, because of the greater diversity of languages with more distant relationshipsto each other there.

There have been serious linguistic proponents of almost every conceivable possible set of relationships of theAfro-Asiatic language subfamilies to each other, although there is reasonably great consensus concerning thesubfamily classification of all but a few of the Afro-Asiatic languages. Some of this difficulty in resolving theAfro-Asiatic family tree flows from the time depth of these languages. The Afro-Asiatic Egyptian languageof ancient Egypt (whose latest stage is known as Coptic) is one of the two oldest written language on Earth(the other being the Sumerian language, a language isolate) dating in written form to approximately 3000BCE, and the Semitic Akkadian language was also attested in writing from a very early date (ca. 2000 BCE).A common Afro-Asiatic proto-language is necessarily older than these very old written languages which

belonged to language families that had already diverged from each other considerably by that point. There isalso no one genetic profile that is uniform among Afro-Asiatic language speakers that clearly unites them.There are also competing theories on whether the Afro-Asiatic language family owes its expansion to the

Neolithic revolution that originated in an area that includes the range of the Afro-Asiatic language, or wasalready widespread in the Upper Paleolithic era. Notably, the Afro-Asiatic language family is spoken in mostof the places that are leading candidates for the origins of the modern human species and most ofintermediate species between modern humans and the Great Apes in human evolution.


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Semitic homeland

There has been speculation regarding the specific Semitic subfamily of Afro-Asiatic languages, again withthe Horn of Africa and Southwest Asiaspecifically the Levantbeing the most common proposals. Thelarge number of Semitic languages present in the Horn of Africa seems at first glance to support thehypothesis that the Semitic homeland lies there. However, the Semitic languages in the Horn of Africa all

belong to the South Semitic subfamily and appear to all have relatively recent common origins in a single

Ethio-Semitic proto-language, while the East and Central Semitic languages are native solely to Asia. Thesefeatures, and the presence of certain common Semitic lexical items in all Ethio-Semitic languages referring toitems that arrived in Africa from the Levant at a time after Semitic languages were known to have beenspoken in the Levant, have lent weight to the Levantine proposal.

Hebrew is found in Europe due to the Jewish diaspora after the fall of the Second Temple in 70 CE thatmarked the beginning of Rabbinic Judaism. It is relatively closely related to the Arabic language even withinthe Semitic language family, being part of the same Central Semitic group.

The Maltese language, the only other Semitic language of Europe, is a derivative of the Arabic language as itwas spoken in Sicily starting sometime after the rise of the Islamic empire in North Africa.

Nilo-Saharan homeland

Genetic studies of Nilo-Saharan-speaking populations are in general agreement with archaeological evidenceand linguistic studies that argue for a Nilo-Saharan homeland in eastern Sudan before 6000 BCE, withsubsequent migration events northward to the eastern Sahara, westward to the Chad Basin, and

southeastward into Kenya and Tanzania.[44]

Linguist Roger Blench has suggested that the Nilo-Saharan languages and the NigerCongo languages may

be branches of the same macrolanguage family.[45][46]Earlier proposals along this line were made by

linguist Edgar Gregersen in 1972.[47]These proposals have not reached a linguistic consensus, however, andthis connection presupposes that all of the Nilo-Saharan languages are actually related in a single family,which has not been definitively established.

Razib Khan, based on analysis of the autosomal genetics of the Tutsi ethnic group of Africa, suggests that"the Tutsi were in all likelihood once a Nilotic speaking population, who switched to the language of the

Bantus amongst whom they settled."[48][49]

NigerCongo homeland

The homeland of the NigerCongo languages, which has as its subfamily the BenueCongo languages, whichin turn includes the Bantu languages, is not known in time or place, beyond the fact that it probablyoriginated in or near the area where these languages were spoken prior to Bantu expansion (i.e. West Africaor Central Africa) and probably predated the Bantu expansion of ca. 3000 BCE by many thousands of

years.[50]Its expansion may have been associated with the expansion of Sahel agriculture in the African

Neolithic period.[50]

According to linguist Roger Blench, as of 2004, all specialists in NigerCongo languages believe thelanguages to have a common origin, rather than merely constituting a typological classification, for reasonsincluding their shared noun-class system, their shared verbal extensions and their shared basic lexicon.

[51][52]Similar classifications have been made ever since Diedrich Westermann in 1922.[53]JosephGreenberg continued that tradition making it the starting point for modern linguistic classification in Africa,

with some of his most notable publications going to press starting in the 1960s.[54]But, there has been activedebate for many decades over the appropriate subclassifications of the languages in that language family,




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The Benue-Congo homeland

which is a key tool used in localizing a language's place of origin. [51]No definitive "Proto-NigerCongo"lexicon or grammar has been developed for the language family as a whole.

An important unresolved issue in determining the time and place where the NigerCongo languagesoriginated and their range prior to recorded history is this language family's relationship to the Kordofanianlanguages now spoken in the Nuba mountains of Sudan, which is not contiguous with the remainder of the

NigerCongo language speaking region and is at the northeasternmost extent of the current NigerCongo

linguistic region. The current prevailing linguistic view is that Kordofanian languages are part of theNigerCongo language family, and that among the many languages still surviving in that region these may be

the oldest.[55]The evidence is insufficient to determine if this outlier group of NigerCongo languagespeakers represent a prehistoric range of a NigerCongo linguistic region that has since contracted as otherlanguages have intruded, or if instead, this represents a group of NigerCongo language speakers whomigrated to the area at some point in prehistory where they were an isolated linguistic community from the

beginning.

The prehistoric range for the NigerCongo languages has implications, not just for the history of theNigerCongo languages, but for the origins of the Afro-Asiatic languages and Nilo-Saharan languages whosehomelands have been hypothesized by some to overlap with the NigerCongo linguistic range prior torecorded history. If the consensus view regarding the origins of the Nilo-Saharan languages which came toEast Africa is adopted, and a North African or Southwest Asian origin for Afro-Asiatic languages is assumed,the linguistic affiliation of East Africa prior to the arrival of Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic languages is leftopen. The overlap between the potential areas of origin for these languages in East Africa is particularlynotable because includes the regions from which the Proto-Eurasians who brought anatomically modernhumans Out of Africa, and presumably their original proto-language or languages originated.

However, there is more agreement regarding the place of origin of the BenueCongo subfamily of languages,which is the largest subfamily of the group, and the place of origin of the Bantu languages and the time atwhich it started to expand is known with great specificity.

The classification of the relatively divergent family of Ubangian languages which are centered in the CentralAfrican Republic, as part of the NigerCongo language family where Greenberg classified them in 1963 and

subsequently scholars concurred,[56]was called into question, by linguist Gerrit Dimmendaal in a 2008

article.[57]

Benue-Congo homeland

Roger Blench, relying particularly on prior work by ProfessorKay Williamson of the University of Port Harcourt, and the

linguist P. De Wolf, who each took the same position, has arguedthat a BenueCongo linguistic subfamily of the NigerCongolanguage family, which includes the Bantu languages and otherrelated languages and would be the largest branch of NigerCongo, is an empirically supported grouping which probablyoriginated at the confluence of the Benue and Congo Rivers in

Central Nigeria.[51][58][59][60][61][62]These estimates of theplace of origin of the Benue-Congo language family do not fix adate for the start of that expansion other than that it must have

been sufficiently prior to the Bantu expansion to allow for the

diversification of the languages within this language family thatincludes Bantu.

Bantu homeland




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There is a widespread consensus among linguistic scholars that Bantu languages of the NigerCongo familyhave a homeland near the coastal boundary of Nigeria and Cameroon, prior to a rapid expansion from that

homeland starting about 3000 BCE.[44][50][63][64][65][66][67]

Linguisic, archeological and genetic evidence also indicates that this expansion included "independent waves

of migration of western African and East African Bantu-speakers into southern Africa occurred."[44]Insome places, Bantu language, genetic evidence suggests that Bantu language expansion was largely a result

of substantial population replacement.[68]In other places, Bantu language expansion, like many otherlanguages, has been documented with population genetic evidence to have occurred by means other thancomplete or predominant population replacement (e.g. via language shift and admixture of incoming andexisting populations). For example, one study found this to be the case in Bantu language speakers who are

African Pygmies or are in Mozambique,[68]while another population genetic study found this to be the case

in the Bantu language speaking Lemba of Zimbabwe.[69]Where Bantu was adopted via language shift ofexisting populations, prior African languages were spoken, probably from African language families that arenow lost, except as substrate influences of local Bantu languages (such as click sounds in local Bantulanguages).

Malagasy language homeland

The Malagasy language of Madagascar is not related to nearby African languages, instead being thewesternmost member of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. The similarity

between Malagasy and Malay and Javanese was noted as long ago as 1708 by the Dutch scholar Adriaan van

Reeland.[70]Malagasy is related to the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Indonesia, Malaysia, and thePhilippines, and more closely with the Southeast Barito group of languages spoken in Borneo except for its

Polynesian morphophonemics.[71]Malagasy shares much of its basic vocabulary with the Ma'anyanlanguage, a language from the region of the Barito River in southern Borneo. This indicates that Madagascar

was first settled by Austronesian people from the Malay Archipelago, who had passed through Borneo. Thishappened approximately 0 CE to 500 CE, prior to which the island of Madagascar lacked human

inhabitants.[50]Later, the original Austronesian settlers must have mixed with Bantus and Arabs, amongst

others.[72]The Malagasy language also includes some borrowings from Arabic, and Bantu languages(notably Swahili). Limited sample size whole genome analysis of Malagasy individuals show that the Africancomponent of the Malagasy genome is most similar to modern Bantu-speaking populations in the eastern

African Great Lakes region.[73]

Language families predominantly found in East Asia, Southeast Asia

and Oceania

Sino-Tibetan homeland




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The Sino-Tibetan languages

According to the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary andThesaurus project of the University of California atBerkeley, the Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) homeland mayhave been "where the great rivers of East and SoutheastAsia (including the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra,Salween, and Irrawaddy) have their source. The time ofhypothetical ST unity, when the Proto-Han (= Proto-

Chinese) and Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB) peoples formed arelatively undifferentiated linguistic community, must havebeen at least as remote as the Proto-Indo-European period,

perhaps around 4000 B.C."[74]

Some scholars place the Tibeto-Burman homeland in thearea encompassing western Sichuan, northern Yunnan and

eastern Tibet.[75]

Population genetic evidence, favors an origin for Proto-Sino-Tibetan languages in the upper and middleYellow River basin, with part of that source population branching off to settle in the Himalayas, with the splitof the population that would provide the genesis of the Chinese language from the population that would

provide the genesis of the larger Sino-Tibetan language family in the East Asian Neolithic era:[76]

"[T]he closest relatives of the Tibetans are the Yi people, who live in the Hengduan Mountainsand were originally formed through fusion with natives along their migration routes into themountains. The Tibetan and Yi languages belong to the Tibeto-Bruman language group and theirancestries can be traced back to an ancient tribe, the Di-Qiang . . . After the ancestors ofSino-Tibetans reached the upper and middle Yellow River basin, they divided into twosubgroups: Proto-Tibeto-Burman and Proto-Chinese. . . . The ancestral component which wasdominant in Tibetan and Yi arose from the Proto-Tibeto-Burman subgroup, which marched on

to south-west China and later, through one of its branches, became the ancestor of modernTibetans. Proto-Tibeto-Burmans also spread over the Hengduan Mountains where the Yi havelived for hundreds of generations. Taking the optimal living condition and the easiest migrationroute into account, we favor the single-route hypothesis; it is more likely that their migrationinto the Tibetan Plateau through the Hengduan Mountain valleys occurred after Tibetanancestors separated from the other Proto-Tibeto-Burman groups and diverged to form themodern Tibetan population."

One of the earliest Neolithic cultures of China in the upper to middle Yellow River basin was the Peiligangculture of 7000 BCE to 5000 BCE, so the population genetic reference in the quoted material is to a date on

or after this time period. The Neolithic era concluded in the Yellow River around 1500 BCE. This is notinconsistent with the linguistically based estimate from the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary andThesaurus project. By the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCE256 BCE), the language spoken in the

Zhou court had become the standardized dialect for that kingdom.[77]

In contrast, four of the other main language families of East Asia and Southeast Asia outside theSino-Tibetan language family, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, HmongMien and TaiKadai, are generally

believed to have at origins at some stage of their development in Southern China.

Austroasiatic homeland




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Austroasiatic languages

The Austronesian Expansion

The homeland of the Austroasiatic languages (e.g.Vietnamese, Cambodian) which are found fromSoutheast Asia to India is hypothesized to be located"the hills of southern Yunnan in China," between 4000

BCE and 2000 BCE,[78]with influences from Aryan andDravidian languages at the Western edge of its expansein India, and influence from Chinese at the Eastern edge

of the regions where it is found. The disjoint distributionof Austroasiatic languages suggest that they were oncespoken in most of the areas where the TaiKadailanguages are now dominant.

However, Paul Sidwell has recently advocated a

homeland in Southeast Asia instead,[79]preferring a late

date of dispersal of about 2000 BCE.[80]

There is a strong correlation between the population

genetic distribution Y-Chromosomal haplogroupO2a1-M95 and the distribution of Austroasiatic language

speakers.[81]

HmongMien homeland

The most likely homeland of the HmongMien languages (aka MiaoYao languages) is in Southern Chinabetween the Yangtze and Mekong rivers, but speakers of these languages may have migrated from CentralChina either as part of the Han Chinese expansion or as a result of exile from an original homeland by Han

Chinese.[82]Migration of people speaking these languages from South China to Southeast Asia took place

ca. 1600-1700 CE. Ancient DNA evidence suggests that the ancestors of the speakers of the HmongMienlanguages were a population genetically distinct from that of the TaiKadai and Austronesian language

source populations at a location on the Yangtze River.[83]Recent Y-DNA phylogeny evidence supports theproposition that people who speak the Hmong-Mien languages are descended from the population that now

speaks Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer languages.[84]

Austronesian homeland

The homeland of the Austronesian languages is Taiwan.On this island the deepest divisions in Austronesian are

found, among the families of the native Formosanlanguages. According to Blust (1999), the Formosanlanguages form nine of the ten primary branches of theAustronesian language family. Comrie (2001:28) notedthis when he wrote:

... the internal diversity among the... Formosanlanguages... is greater than that in all the rest ofAustronesian put together, so there is a majorgenetic split within Austronesian between

Formosan and the rest... Indeed, the geneticdiversity within Formosan is so great that it may well consist of several primary branches of theoverall Austronesian family.

Archaeological evidence (e.g., Bellwood 1997) suggests that speakers of pre-Proto-Austronesian spread




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The TaiKadai languages today

from the South Chinese mainland to Taiwan at some time around 6000 BCE. Evidence from historicallinguistics suggests that it is from this island that seafaring peoples migrated, perhaps in distinct wavesseparated by millennia, to the entire region encompassed by the Austronesian languages (Diamond 2000). Itis believed that this migration began around 4000 BCE (Blust 1999). However, evidence from historicallinguistics cannot bridge the gap between those two periods.

It is possible that the ancient Taiwan aborigines were related to the ancient Minyue, derived in ancient timesfrom the southeast coast of Mainland China, as suggested by linguists Li Jen-Kuei and Robert Blust. It issuggested that in the southeast coastal regions of China, there were many sea nomads during the Neolithicera and they may have spoken ancestral Austronesian languages, and were skilled seafarers.

The specific origins of most far flung member of this language family, the Malagasy language of Madagascaroff the coast of Africa, are described above in the part of this article concerning African languages.

The Austro-Tai hypothesis suggests a common origin for the Austronesian languages and the TaiKadailanguages whose hypothesized place of origin is geographically close to Taiwan.

TaiKadai homeland

Many scholars have addressed the question of the origins

of the TaiKadai languages.[85][86][87][88][89]

There is a consensus that the TaiKadai languages havetheir origins in Southern China or on major nearbyislands (such as Taiwan or Hainan).

The leading hypothesis is that the likely homeland ofproto-TaiKadai was coastal Fujian or Guangdong aspart of the neolithic Longshan culture (of 3000 BCE 2000 BCE). The spread of the TaiKadai peoples mayhave been aided by agriculture, but any who remainednear the coast were eventually absorbed by the Chinese.Weera Ostapirat is one academic who articulates this

position.[90]

Laurent Sagart, on the other hand, holds that TaiKadaiis a branch of Austronesian which migrated back to themainland from northeastern Formosa (i.e. Taiwan) longafter Formosa was settled, but probably before the

expansion of Malayo-Polynesian out of Formosa.[91][92][93]The language was then largely relexified fromwhat he believes may have been an Austroasiaticlanguage. Sagart suggests that Austro-Tai is ultimately related to the Sino-Tibetan languages and has its originin the Neolithic communities of the coastal regions of prehistoric North China or East China.

Ostapirat, by contrast, sees connections with the Austroasiatic languages (in Austric), as has Benedict.[94][95][96]Reid notes that the two approaches are not incompatible, if Austric is valid and can be connected

to Sino-Tibetan.[97]

Robert Blust (1999) suggests that proto-TaiKadai speakers originated in the northern Philippines andmigrated from there to Hainan (hence the diversity of TaiKadai languages on that island), and wereradically restructured following contact with HmongMien and Sinitic. However, Ostapirat maintains thatTaiKadai could not descend from Malayo-Polynesian in the Philippines, and likely not from the languages




17/34

of eastern Formosa either. His evidence is in the TaiKadai sound correspondences, which reflectAustronesian distinctions that were lost in Malayo-Polynesian and even Eastern Formosan.

Genetic evidence coroborates evidence from Kadai speaking people's oral traditions that puts a Kadai

homeland on Hainan.[98]Ancient DNA evidence also shows a connection between speakers of TaiKadai

speaking populations and Austronesian language speaking populations,[83]and a genetically distinct

population at a different location on the Yangtze River as a possible source of HmongMien languages.[83]

Mongolic homeland

Some historians suggest that the people assiociated with the Slab Grave Culture (1100 BC-300 BC) were the

direct ancestors of the Xiongnu and Mongols.[99]Slab Grave cultural monuments are found in Mongolia,Inner Mongolia, Northwest China (Xinjiang region, Qilian Mountains etc.), Northeast China, Lesser KhinganMountains and southern Siberia. The identity of the ethnic core of Xiongnu has been a subject of varied

hypotheses and some scholars insisted on a Mongolic origin.[100]Xiongnu Empire (209-BC93 AD)became a dominant power on the steppes of Central Asia. They were active in regions of what is nowsouthern Siberia, Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Xinjiang Province. According to some scientistsview, the Mongols expanded into present day Mongolia sometime after the demise of the Karasuk culture(1500-300 BC), an Indo-European and, according to ancient DNA, genetically Western Eurasian

population.[101]Genghis Khan, starting around 1206 CE, waged a series of military campaigns that, togetherwith campaigns by his successors, stretched from present-day Poland in the west to Korea in the east andfrom Siberia in the north to the Gulf of Oman and Vietnam in the south, after which the empire ultimately

collapsed with little long lasting linguistic impact outside the core Mongolian area.[102]

Japanese and Korean language homelands

Today, there is one Korean language spoken in Korea, and a small family of related languages called Japonicspoken in Japan. There is also an Ainu language spoken by an ethnic minority in Northern Japan.

There were multiple languages spoken in Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula prior to Korea's unification,and there is dispute over which of those languages gave rise to modern Korean sometime in the firstmillennium CE, and what relationship that proto-language may have had to the proposed family of Altaiclanguages. The core three populations in the Altaic classification show autosomal population genetic

commonalities. These core three populations also show lexical affinities in their languages.[103]

There is also dispute over the extent, if any, to which one of those multiple languages of the Koreanpeninsula prior to its unification gave rise to the Japanese language, and if so, which of those languages was

the language of the Yayoi part of the founding group of modern Japan. The Yayoi may also have hadlinguistic influences from China. Japanese links to Altaic languages, if they exist, could have arisen via anAltaic source for a Korean peninsula language spoken by the Yayoi, and/or via Altaic influences on the Ainulanguages via contacts between the Ainu people and Siberia.

The Ainu language or another extinct language of the indigenous people of Japan called the Jmon may havealso been a formative element in the Japanese language as the Yayoi people and the Jmon peoplemergedinto a common Japanese ethnicity around 2300 years ago.

Both the Koreans and the Japanese make use of Chinese ideograms in their written language, whose Chinese

origins are not disputed. However, neither of these spoken languages is closely related to the spoken Chineselanguage, and need not be because ideograms do not code phonetic versions of the ideas that they describe.

Korean




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Korea in 576 CE.

The Korean language is spoken in Korea and among emigrants fromKorea. Conservative historical linguists tend to classify the Koreanlanguage as a language isolate, although other suggest a relationshipto Altaic languages or to Japonic languages.

Old Korean is attested in Chinese histories, in the Three Kingdomsperiod of Korea (ca. 0 to 900 CE), when the Silla Kingdom (inEastern Korea), Baekje Kingdom (in Southwestern Korea), andGoguryeo Kingdom (in Northern Korea) were simultaneously presenton the Korean peninsula, although Korean was not a literarylanguage until later; the hangul script of Korean was invented in the15th century CE (the earlier Idu script dates to the 6th century CE).

There was a group of similar languages called the Buyeo languages inthe northern Korean Peninsula and southern Manchuria and possiblyJapan, which included, according to Chinese records, the languagesof Buyeo, Goguryeo, Baekje, Dongye, Okjeo, and possiblyGojoseon, but was different from ancient Manchu languages like

Mohe language. Gojoseon was a kingdom in Northern Korea that issaid by tradition to have been founded in 2333 BC (archaeological evidence and Chinese histories support acultural civilization from around 1500 BCE and a kingdom fused from a federation of smaller states aroundthe 7th century BCE), that was conquered by Han Dynasty China in 108 BC, and re-emereged from Chineserule as the Kingdom Buyeo. The Three Kingdoms era kingdoms of Goguryeo and Baekje were successors tothe Kingdom of Buyeo. Dongye was a vassal state of Goguryeo in Northeast Korea founded in the3rd-century BCE that was eventually absorbed by Goguryeo around the 5th century CE. Okjeo was a minorstate in Northern Korea to the North of Dongye that was a subordinate unit of Gojoseon from the 3rdcentury BCE to 108 BCE, then came under Han rule, and then was a subordinate state of Goguryeo. Noneof these Buyeo language family kingdoms ever included the Kingdom of Silla, which was just a small

kingdom on the Southern coast of Korea until the Three Kingdoms period during which it expanded andconquered the other two kingdoms.

Linguists including Christopher Beckwith argue for Japanese as a descendant of Goguryeo, and for Koreanas a descendant of the Silla language, based on lexical similarities between Goguryeo and Japanese, and

based upon Silla's ultimate triumph in the quest for political control of Korea. Other linguistists, includingKim Banghan, Alexander Vovin, and J. Marshall Unger argue that Japanese is related to the pre-Goguryeolanguage of the central and southern part of Korean peninsula, including what would become the Kingdomof Silla, and that Old Korean is Goguryeo with a pre-Goguryeo Japonic substrate, in part, becauseJapanese-like toponyms found in the historical homeland of Silla were also distributed in southern part ofKorean peninsula, and are not found in the northern part of Korean peninsula or south-western

Manchuria.[104]None of the extinct languages is attested in writing well enough to reach definitiveconclusions resolving the debate.

Japanese and Ainu languages

Japanese language family languages are spoken in Japan and among emigrants from Japan and is attested inJapanese language writing from the 8th century CE, and in imperfect Chinese transcriptions from the late 5thcentury CE. Conservative historical linguists tend to classify a small number of Japanese languages as alanguage family of their own. The Ainu languages are a barely surviving family of closely related languagesor dialects that were spoken by indigenous populations on the island of Hokkaid in what is now northern

Japan as well as on the island of Sakhalin and the Kuril Archipelago in what is now the Russian Far East atthe time of the oldest extant historical records concerning those islands.

There are similarities between the Japanese language and the Korean language in lexicon and grammatical




19/34

Location of Ezo

features, but there is dispute over whether these denote a common origin, or mere linguistic borrowing due toa sprachbund of neighboring languages that are adjacent to each other. Samuel E. Martin, Roy Andrew

Miller, and Sergei Starostin are linguists who have argued that they have common origins.[105][106]

[107][108][109]In contrast, Alexander Vovin has argued for a regional borrowing model to explain the

linguistic similarities.[110]

One hypothesis proposes that Japanese is a relative of the extinct languages spoken by the Buyeo-Goguryeo

cultures of Korea, southern Manchuria, and Liaodong of which the best attested is the extinct languageGoguryeo.[111][112][113]This proposal is attributed to Shinmura Izuru, who proposed it in 1916. ModernKorean, in contrast, according to proponents of this hypothesis, appears to have stronger connections theSilla language, spoken in the ancient kingdom of Silla (57 BC AD 935), one of the Three Kingdoms ofKorea, whose similarity to the Goguryeo language is not clearly established.

The earliest Chinese historical records concerning the "Wa" in Japan indicate that they were fractured intomany warring states. But, modern Japanese dialects show a common origin, rather than a "bushy" one. So, itis possible that there were many Yayoi dialects in the period before Old Japanese emerged, of which thedialect of the warring states that ended up prevailing politically as the Japanese state was unified superseded

other early Yayoi languages or dialects.[114]

After a new wave of immigration, probably from the Korean Peninsula some 2,300 years ago, of the Yayoipeople, the Jmon were pushed into northern Japan. Genetic data suggest that modern Japanese aredescended from both the Yayoi and the Jmon. Tradition, as documented by theNihon Shoki, a legendaryaccount of Japan's history, puts the date of the Yayoi arrival in Japan at 660 BCE. Chinese historical recordsmention the existence of the Yayoi (called "Wa") starting in 57 BCE. The existing Japanese language has itsorigins at approximately this point in time, if not earlier (to the extent that Japanese derives primarily fromeither the language of the Bronze Age Yayoi people, as it existed prior to their arrival in Japan, or derives

primarily from a language of the Jmon at that point of time, rather than being a creole of some sort).

Skeletal remains suggests that the two cultures had fused into a group with a homogeneous physicalappearance in Southern Japan by 250 CE.[114]It is possible that the Japanese language has roots related tothe Ainu language, the historical language of the Yayoi, whatever that may have been, or could have been acreole of both. It is also possible the Japanese has roots in a language spoken in Southern Japan that is lost

and now unknown.[114]

The Ainu peopleare genetic descendants of the Jmon, with some

contribution from the Okhotsk people.[115]The Ainu languages thatare now spoken by Ainu minorities in Hokkaid; and were formerly

spoken in southern and central Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands (an

area also known as Ezo), and perhaps northern Honsh island by theEmishi people (until approximately 1000 CE), are associated with thefounding Jmon peopleof Japan from than 14,000 years ago orearlier, and the Satsumon cultureof Hokkaid, although the Ainualso had contact with the Paleo-Siberian Okhotsk culture whose modern descendants include the Nivkh

people (whose original homeland was mostly occupied by the Tungusic people), which could have

linguistically influenced the Ainu language.[116]Thus, as a result of this important outside cultural influence,it is impossible to know with certainty how similar the language of the original language of the Jmon peoplewas to that spoken by the Ainu people today. Some linguists have suggested other language familyconnections for the Ainu language: Shafer has suggested a distant connection to the Austroasiatic

languages.[117]Vovin, had viewed that suggestion as merely preliminary.[118]Japanese linguist ShichirMurayama tried to link Ainu to the Austronesian languages, which include the languages of the Philippines,Taiwan, and Indonesia through both vocabulary and cultural comparisons. There is no consensus, however,that the Ainu languages have sources in any other known language, and the unique population genetics of




20/34

Location of Ryukyu Islands

the Ainu people support the hypothesis that they were largely isolated from the rest of the world for manythousands of years.

The Yayoi people had strong physical, genetic and cultural similarities to the Chinese during the Han

Dynasty (202 BCE-8) in the Jiangsu province on China's Eastern Coast.[119]The Yayoi also have strong

cultural similarities to the Koreans of that time period.[114][120]

Some linguists, such as Turchin,[103]see a connection betweenJapanese and Korean and an Altaic language family or similar largergrouping of languages, with those speakers coming from an area

North of Korea, based in part upon similarities in lexical roots. Thestatistical method used by Turchin, however, would not discriminate

between Jmon and Yayoi sources for any Altaic linguistic affinities.

Turchin's analysis also did not look at the various proposed ancientpredecessors of the Korean language in Korea or the relationship ofthose languages to any of the proto-Altaic languages, despite the factthat the hypothesis would require one of those ancient Korean

peninsular languages to be intermediate between Japanese and one ofthe proto-Altaic languages. Old Japanese when first attested hadeight vowels, rather than the current five (which were lost within acentury of the oldest preserved writings) which was close to the vowel system seen in Uralic and Altaic

languages.[121]Old Japanese also had more grammatical similarity to Altaic languages than modernJapanese.

These classifications of the origins of Japanese language origins ignore significant borrowing from otherlanguages in recent times. Current estimates are that "wago" (i.e. words attributable to the original Yayoilanguage) make up 33.8% of the Japanese lexicon, that "kango" (i.e. words with roots borrowed fromChinese since the 5th century CE) make up 49.1% of Japanese words (and in addition, the Chineseideograms used in the Japanese written language), that foreign words called gairaigo make up 8.8% of

Japanese words, and that 8.3% of Japanese words are konshugo that draw upon multiple languages.[122]Thisaccount attributes only a small number of words in modern Japanese to Ainu roots.

The six Ryukyuan languages spoken in the islands to the South of Japan, are descended from Japanese butare not mutually intelligble with Japanese with which they share about 72% of their words (or each other)and started to diverge from Japanese around the 7th century CE. these islands were united in a Ryukyuankingdom from 1429 CE (prior to that there were multiple divided kingdoms which were tributary states ofChina after 1372 CE); the kingdom was a tributary state of China until 1609 when it became a vassal state ofJapan, until it was annexed by Japan in 1879. These languages were then suppressed and while they have

about a million native speakers, there are relatively few native speakers under the age of twenty. They areeffectively minority languages in their own countries at this point.

Other groups

The only language isolates or language families predominantly spoken in Southeast Asia, East Asia andOceania that do not belong to one of the language families above are the indigenous languages of Melanesia(which number more than eight hundred or more in perhaps sixty language families), which are describedwith a geographic term that does not presume a genetic relationship between them as the Papuan languages,and the Australian aboriginal languages (of which there are about one hundred and fifty remaining in about

ten language families, all of which, except the languages of the PamaNyungan languages are largelyconfined to the central Northern coast of Australia). No linguists have found a language family connection

between indigenous Papuan and Australian aboriginal languages and those of Asia, Africa, the Americas orany other part of the world. Indeed, no linguistic connection has been established between the indigenous




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Area of the Na-Dene languages

Eskimo-Aleut languages

languages of Melanesia and the indigenous languages of the Aboriginal Australians. [123]This is consistentwith the mainstream view, supported by population genetics and archaeology, that Papua New Guinea andAustralia, as well as some of the islands neighboring Papua New Guinea, were first inhabited by hominins(humans or otherwise) at least 40,000 years ago in migrations that were either separate or swiftly segregated,and that many of these populations have had only limited contact with outside populations until the modernera. While there are plausible reasons to infer that the Melanesian languages and the aboriginal Australianlanguages, respectively, have common origins in a small founding population with a single language, the

linguists have not been able to marshal lexical, phonetic and grammatical evidence from these languages intheir current form to support these inferences.

Languages spoken predominantly in North and South America

Na-Dene

Since 2008, linguist Edward Vajda has been advocating, andattempting to demonstrate, a genetic link between the Na-Denelanguages of North America and the Yeniseian languages of central

Siberia, suggesting a homeland in Siberia or a back migration ofNa-Dene speakers from Beringia. Na-Dene languages are spoken byNative Alaskans and some people from the First Nations of WesternCanada, in the Pacific Northwest, and also includes the SouthernAthabaskan languages spoken in the American Southwest (e. g., thelanguages Apache and Navajo). The proposal, which does notoriginate with Vajda but is considerably older, is not generallyaccepted among linguists.

Eskimo-Aleut

The EskimoAleut languages are spoken by native peoples of the Arctic regions of Alaska and Canada andGreenland, generally to the North of Na-Dene linguistic areas (shown on the map on the left).

Current ancient and modern DNA scholarship and archaeologysupports a three-layer paradigm in which first the Saqqaq (ArcticPaleo-Eskimos) which was present 2000 BCE, then the Dorset(second wave Arctic Paleo-Eskimos), and finally the Thule (proto-Inuit) from ca. 500 CE 1000 CE, successively sweep Arctic NorthAmerica while having little genetic impact on Native American

populations further South, that presumably have origins that dateback to the initial colonization of the Americas by modern humansfrom Asia (who are the first hominins to live there), and ancient DNAshows genetic continuity from the Thule to modern Inuit (whosegenetics are remarkably homogeneous), dominated by the A2a, A2b,and D3 mtDNA haplotypes, while "Haplotype D2 (3%), found amongmodern Aleut and Siberian Eskimos, was identified at a lowfrequency in the modern samples but not the ancient. This haplotype

was recently identified in an ancient Paleo-Eskimo Saqqaq individual from western Greenland. . . . Wholegenomic sequencing of the 4,000 year old PaleoEskimo, "Inuk," indicated that the Saqqaq sequencesclustered with the Chukchi and Koryaks of Siberia-suggesting an earlier migration from Siberia along the

northern slope of Alaska to Greenland."[124]Evidence such as bronze artifacts produced in East Asia fromca. 1000 CE, further supports a proto-Eskimo-Aleut arrival in the polar regions of North America ca. 500 CE

1000 CE.[125]




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Wakashan languages

Uto-Axtecan languages

The proto-Eskimo-Aleut migration to North America, associated withthe Thule expansion in North America ca. 500 CE, took place muchmore recently than the initial human population of North America,which took place more than 14,000 years ago. Also, the modern Inuit

populations are genetically distinct from other indigenous populationsof the Americas. Thus, evidence from genetics and archaeologystrongly supports an East Asian origin for Eskimo-Aleut languages

sometime in the last 1500 years that is distinct from most otherindigenous languages of the Americas. But there is no linguisticconsensus on any particular languages of East Asia with which this

family of North American languages is associated.[126]It is entirelypossible that Eastern Siberian languages most closely ancestral toEskimo-Aleut are extinct. Many indigenous languages and cultures ofthis region have died in the face of expanded Russian cultural andnational influence starting in the 18th century.

Michael Fortescue in 1998 proposed a group of Uralo-Siberian languages, in which Uralic languages likeFinnish were related to Eskimo-Aleut languages supported by lexical correspondences and grammaticalsimilarities, expanding upon a proposal of Morris Swadesh in 1962 that itself reiterates similarities that have

been noted since at least 1746.[127]Fortescue argues that the Uralo-Siberian proto-language (or a complex ofrelated proto-languages) may have been spoken by Mesolithic hunting and fishing people in south-centralSiberia (roughly, from the upper Yenisei river to Lake Baikal) between 8000 and 6000 BC, and that the

proto-languages of the derived families may have been carried northward out of this homeland in severalsuccessive waves down to about 4000 BC, leaving the Samoyedic branch of Uralic in occupation of theUrheimat thereafter.

A 2005 proposal by Holst, also reiterating a proposal of Swadesh from 1962, suggests that the Wakashanlanguages (map on right) spoken in British Columbia around and on Vancouver Island, are part of the same

language family as the Eskimo-Aleut languages.[128]This proposal, if accurate, would suggest that Na-Denelanguages may have arrived in North America after (although not long after) Eskimo-Aleut languages.

Phonologically, the EskimoAleut languages resemble other languages of northern North America and fareastern Siberia.

Uto-Aztecan

Some authorities on the history of the Uto-Aztecan language groupplace its homeland in the border region between the USA and

Mexico, namely the upland regions of Arizona and New Mexico andthe adjacent areas of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuaua,shown on the map (below left) roughly corresponding to the SonoranDesert. The proto-language would have been spoken by foragers,about 5,000 years ago. Hill (2001) proposes instead a homelandfurther south, making the assumed speakers of Proto-Uto-Aztecanmaize cultivators in Mesoamerica, who were gradually pushed north,

bringing maize cultivation with them, during the period of roughly4,500 to 3,000 years ago, the geographic diffusion of speakers

corresponding to the breakup of linguistic unity.[129]

Tupian




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Tupi languages

Tupi_languages Are predominantly spoken in western SouthAmerica, Specially in Brazil and Paraguay with branches inneighboring countries. They are believed by some scholars to berelated to Carib and J languages. The Tupian was once spoken bythe Powerfull Tupian Nations of the Coast encountered by theEuropeans. And still spoken By the tribes of Xingu and the Guaranito small nomadic peoples uncontacted in the Amazon. The language

was adapted and used by Bandeirantes explorers and raiders fromSo Paulo who explored the then unknown interior of Brazil insearch of gold and slaves. and transformed it in dialects who later

become the Nhngatu or Lingua Geral and made it the most widellyspoken language in Brazil until the Marquis of Pombal impose theuse of Portuguese in the Colony Rodrigues (2007) considers theProto-Tupian homeland to be somewhere between the Guapor and

Aripuan rivers, in the Madeira River basin.[2] Much of this area corresponds to the modern-day state ofRondnia, Brazil. 5 of the 10 Tupian branches are found in this area, as well as some TupiGuaranilanguages (especially Kawahb), making it the probable urheimat of these languages and maybe of itsspeaking peoples. Rodrigues believes the Proto-Tupian language dates back to around 5,000 B.P.

Other groups

Other than Dene-Yeniseian, and a possible connection between the Eskimo-Aleut language family and theUralic language family, no proposals of genetic relations between languages of North or South America andlanguages of Eurasia, Africa, or other parts of the world, have been backed by credible evidence. There isnot, for example, any indication that the Vikings who had a brief presence in North America around 1000CE left any linguistic trace.

Population genetic evidence suggests that the non-circumpolar indigenous peoples of the Americas have

origins in a small common founder population in the Upper Paleolithic era that arrived via a Berginian landbridge from Asia.[130][131][132][133]This population genetic data point suggests the possibility that allindigenous Native American languages of non-circumpolar indigenous Americans (i.e. neither Inuit-Aleutnor Na-Dene) have genetic origins in a single language of the founding population of the Americas, andhence, as controversially proposed by Greenberg, that they all ultimately belong to the same linguistic

superfamily, which Greenberg called Amerind.[134]But, there is not clear evidence of this from efforts touse traditional comparative linguistic methods to classify indigenous Native American languages. The

process of identifying linguistic origins with traditional linguistic methods begins with the process ofclassifying languages into families.

In general, more progress has been made in identify language family relationships in North America, wherethe just under three hundred attested languages are grouped into twenty-nine language families andtwenty-seven language isolates (some of which are simply incapable of being classified because they areextinct and were not sufficiently well attested to classify). Two (super-) family proposals, Penutian andHokan generally along the Pacific coast of North America that are gaining currency among linguists, wouldreduce the number of language families in North America to about fifteen. However, in large portions of theSoutheast United States where it is known that there was considerable pre-Columbian linguistic diversity,there are no attested indigenous languages and the populations in question either left no survivors, or allremaining speakers of relocated tribes with diminished numbers underwent language shift as their ancestrallanguages became moribund.

Mesoamerica was home to one of the most developed succession of farming societies in the Americas in thepre-Columbian era. Mesoamerica's attested languages are likewise quite well systematized into six mainlanguage families and four other language isolates or small language families, as well as a few unclassifiedextinct languages, encompassing all of the languages in the region. Mesoamerica is also the only part of the




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Americas in which written languages were in use in the pre-Columbian era.

In South America there are about 350 living indigenous languages (in addition to many creoles) and anestimated more than one thousand extinct languages, grouped into more than 140 categories, only ten ofwhich have more than five languages which have been demonstrated to belong to the same language family.This is about three times as much linguistic diversity at the language family/language isolate level as NorthAmerica and Mesoamerica combined. The nave expectation from population genetics would have been thatthere would be less linguistic diversity, because the entire indigenous population of South America appearsto derive genetically from only a subset of an already small indigenous founder population of the Americasas a whole, something illustrated, for example, by its lack several of the less common genetic haplotypesfound in indigenous America outside South America (although genetic diversity has accumulated in these

populations over time through mutations distinguishing these populations from the founder populationgenomes). Some of the lack of classification of indigenous South American languages may be simplyattributable to the small number of linguists devoted to the task and the limited amount of informationavailable about many of the languages. But the languages of the region may also simply be particularlydiverse due to separation by great time depth and geographic

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