Overview

This book addresses the complex question of how and why languages have spread across the globe: why do we find large language families distributed over a wide area in some regions, while elsewhere we find clusters of very small families or language isolates? What roles have agriculture, geography, climate, ethnic identity, and language ideologies played in language spread? In this volume, international experts in the field provide new answers to these and related questions, drawing on the increasingly large databases available and on novel analytical research techniques.The first part of the volume outlines some general issues and approaches in the study of language dispersal, diversification, and contact. In the rest of the volume, chapters compare the language and population histories of three major regions - Island Southeast Asia/Oceania, Africa, and South America - which show particularly interesting contrasts in the distribution of languages and language families. The volume is interdisciplinary in approach, with insights from archaeology, genetics, anthropology, and geography, and will be of interest to a wide range of scholars interested in language diversity and contact.

Full Product Details

Author:   Mily Crevels (Senior University Lecturer in Linguistics, Senior University Lecturer in Linguistics, Leiden University) ,  Pieter Muysken (Professor of Linguistics, Professor of Linguistics, Radboud University Nijmegen)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 16.20cm , Height: 2.60cm , Length: 24.00cm
Weight:   0.684kg
ISBN:  

9780198723813

ISBN 10:   0198723814
Pages:   378
Publication Date:   24 July 2020
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

1: Mily Crevels and Pieter Muysken: Patterns of diversification and contact: Re-examining dispersal hypotheses Part I: General approaches 2: Johanna Nichols: Dispersal patterns shape areal typology 3: Peter Trudgill: Sociolinguistic typology and the uniformitarian hypothesis 4: Tom Güldemann and Harald Hammarström: Geographical axis effects in large-scale linguistic distributions 5: Balthasar Bickel: Large and ancient linguistic areas Part II: Southeast Asia and Oceania 6: Marian Klamer, Mily Crevels, and Pieter Muysken: Patterns of dispersal and diversification in Island Southeast Asia and Oceania 7: Nicholas Evans: Time, diversification, and dispersal on the Australian continent: Three enigmas of linguistic prehistory 8: William A. Foley: Language diversity, geomorphological change, and population movements in the Sepik-Ramu basin of Papua New Guinea 9: Jean-Christophe Galipaud: The dynamics of human expansion and cultural diversification in Southeast Asia and Oceania during the Neolithic: An archaeological perspective 10: Mark Donohue and Tim Denham: The role of contact and language shift in the spread of Austronesian languages across Island Southeast Asia Part III: Africa 11: Gerrit J. Dimmendaal, Mily Crevels, and Pieter Muysken: Patterns of dispersal and diversification in Africa 12: Gerrit J. Dimmendaal: Language diversification and contact in Africa 13: Koen Bostoen: The Bantu expansion: Some facts and fiction 14: Maarten Mous: Language isolates and the spread of pastoralism in East Africa Part IV: South America 15: Pieter Muysken and Mily Crevels: Patterns of dispersal and diversification in South America 16: Patience Epps: Amazonian linguistic diversity and its sociocultural correlates 17: Robert S. Walker: Cultural phylogenetics in lowland South America

Reviews

Author Information

Mily Crevels is Senior University Lecturer in Linguistics at Leiden University. Her main research interests are the indigenous languages of South America, especially in the Guaporé-Mamoré and Gran Chaco regions, language documentation, and linguistic typology. She is the co-founder and editor of the series 'Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas' (Brill) and has edited multiple books on the native languages of South America Pieter Muysken is Professor of Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen. His main research interests are Andean languages, Creole languages, and language contact, and his current work focuses on language contact and language history in South America. His books include Bilingual Speech: A Typology of Code-Mixing (CUP, 2000), The Languages of the Andes (with Willem Adelaar; CUP, 2004) and Functional Categories (CUP, 2008). Mily Crevels and Pieter Muysken are the editors of the four-volume work Lenguas de Bolivia (Plural, 2009-2015) and of South American Indigenous Languages: Four Descriptive Studies (Brill, forthcoming).

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions