Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis (review)

1. Introduction

The huge increase in knowledge of linguistic geography during the twentieth century meant that by its last quarter linguists were in possession of quite a detailed map of the world’s language families. The distribution of these families proved to be patchy. Some parts of the world have geographically larger language families than others, and almost nowhere is distribution uniform, as larger families often have smaller families and language isolates on or near their peripheries. This map raises a variety of questions, principal among them: how have large language families acquired and maintained their geographic range? Clearly, the explanations do not lie in the structures of the languages themselves but in geographic, climatic, technological, socioeconomic, and political phenomena.

The search for answers has generated a substantial cross-disciplinary literature, to which the volume under review is an important contribution. It is dedicated to the farming/language dispersal hypothesis (henceforth FLDH), proposed by the volume’s editors; see, for example, Renfrew 1991, 1992, 2000 and Bellwood 1997, 2001. Under the FLDH, many of the world’s more widespread language families owe their spread to their early speakers’ participation in a Neolithic transition—the shift from a hunter-gatherer/forager lifestyle to agriculture—and to subsequent population growth that steadily pushed the new farmers and their language into wider and wider territories, displacing the languages of preexisting forager populations.

Neolithic transitions differed greatly in date from one region to another (and in some regions, such as Australia, did not occur before European colonization), but all have occurred during the Holocene, the period extending from the end of the Pleistocene until today. The Pleistocene was the period of the great Ice Ages, beginning around 1.8 million years ago and ending with the Younger Dryas, a short cold period (roughly 11,400–10,000 bc) which followed a major retreat of the ice. The world’s first Neolithic transition evidently occurred in the Middle East, giving rise to the Late Natufian culture described by Bar-Yosef in Ch. 10 of the volume.

Bellwood and Renfrew suggest that traces of a Neolithic transition will be recognizable not only to archaeologists and linguists, but also to geneticists, who should be able to reconstruct archaic population movements. To pursue the FLDH, the editors organized the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis Symposium in Cambridge in August 2001, and the volume contains thirty-six chapters, versions of papers presented at the symposium.

The FLDH has led to controversy in all three disciplines, although linguists, ironically, have probably engaged in it the least, and this is reflected in the contributions to the volume: eighteen are by archaeologists, eleven by geneticists, and only seven by linguists. Opinions represented range from acceptance to almost total rejection of the FLDH, and the editors are to be congratulated for encouraging such a wide range of views. Approaches range from interdisciplinary syntheses (the majority) to single-discipline contributions (a minority), and most of the authors write for colleagues in other disciplines: we are reminded several times, for example, that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) reflects the maternal line, Y-chromosomes the paternal.

There is good evidence that the expansion of a number of the world’s major language families was indeed associated with a Neolithic transition. At the same time, no one denies that there have been major linguistic dispersals that are not associated with agriculture or, conversely, that there have been agricultural revolutions that have not resulted in a largescale language dispersal (Renfrew, Ch. 1; Bellwood, Ch. 2). Thus other generalizations besides the FLDH are going to be needed if we are to account for the distribution of the world’s language families before Columbus, and several of them are to be found in Renfrew’s and Bellwood’s earlier work as well as in the present volume. I refer to some of them below.

The chapters are organized into six sections. The first, by the...