The farming/language dispersal hypothesis[1] proposes that many of the largest
language families in the world dispersed along with the expansion of
agriculture. This hypothesis was proposed by archaeologists
Peter Bellwood and
Colin Renfrew. It has been widely debated and archaeologists, linguists, and geneticists often disagree with all or only parts of the hypothesis.
The hypothesis
The farming/language dispersal hypothesis links the spread of farming in pre-historic times with the spread of languages and language families. The hypothesis is that a language family begins when a society with its own language adopts farming as a primary means of subsistence while its neighbors are hunter-gatherers who speak unrelated languages. A sedentary farming society supports a much greater density of population than its neighboring nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers. The language of the farming society displaces that of the hunter-gatherer society which may also become agricultural. Farming and the language of the original farmers spread to more and more societies. In some cases the original language, which evolves over time into many different but related languages, has attained world-wide dispersion.[2][3]
In sum, "the farming/language dispersal hypothesis makes the radical and controversial proposal that the present-day distributions of many of the world's languages and language families can be traced back to the early developments and dispersals of farming..."[4]
Examples
Indo-European
The
Anatolian hypothesis states that
Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in
Anatolia throughout the
Neolithic period, and that the spread of the Indo-European language was associated with the
Neolithic Revolution of the 7th-6th millennium BC. It claims that the
Proto-Indo-European language spread from
Asia Minor to
Europe around 7000 BC with the Neolithic Revolution and peacefully mixed with indigenous peoples.[5] Therefore, most Neolithic Europeans spoke an Indo-European language, and later migrations replaced it with another Indo-European language. However, there is currently more evidence that supports the
Kurgan hypothesis, which is another explanation for the origin and dispersal of the Indo-European languages.[6][7]
Bantu
The Bantu languages descend from a common
Proto-Bantu language, which is believed to have been spoken in what is now
Cameroon in
Central Africa.[8] An estimated 2,500–3,000 years ago (1000 BC to 500 BC), speakers of the Proto-Bantu language began a series of migrations eastward and southward, carrying agriculture with them. This
Bantu expansion came to dominate Sub-Saharan Africa east of Cameroon, an area where
Bantu peoples now constitute nearly the entire population.[8][9] Some other sources estimate the Bantu Expansion started closer to ~5,000 years ago.[10]
Afro-Asiatic
There are two hypotheses about the
origin of the Proto-Afroasiatic languages, the Levant theory and the African continental theory. According to the theory of a homeland in Levant, the distribution was expanded to Africa in conjunction with the spread of agriculture.[11][12] Terrazas Mata et al. (2013) have argued that the Proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers would have originated in the Middle East and subsequently migrated into the areas of North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.[13] There are however many scholars who accept an African phylum language origin since five of the six Afro-Asiatic subfamilies are spoken on the African continent, and only one in Asia.[14]Christopher Ehret, S.O. Y. Keita, and Paul Newman have also argued that archaeology does not indicate a spread of migrating farmers into northern Africa, but rather a gradual incorporation of animal husbandry into
indigenous foraging cultures.[15]
Since 2019, phylogenetic studies of 50
Sino-Tibetan languages that have existed from ancient times to the present day have proved the hypothesis that the language family expanded with agricultural transmission. It is concluded that the Sino-Tibetan language family originated from the
millet farming people located in North China 7,200 years ago.[27][28][29][30]
^Renfrew, Colin (1990) [1987]. Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-52-138675-3.
^Bomhard, Allan R. (2008). Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic: Comparative Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary, 2 volumes. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-16853-4
^Robbeets, M (2017)
The language of the Transeurasian farmers. In Robbeets, M and Savelyev, A (eds), Language Dispersal Beyond Farming (pp. 93–116). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
^
Robbeets, M (2020)
The Transeurasian homeland: where, what and when? In Robbeets, M, Hübler, N and Savelyev, A (eds), The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
^Serafim, Leon A. (2008), "The uses of Ryukyuan in understanding Japanese language history", in Frellesvig, Bjarke; Whitman, John (eds.), Proto-Japanese: Issues and Prospects, John Benjamins, pp. 79–99, ISBN 978-90-272-4809-1.
^Vovin, Alexander (2017),“
Origins of the Japanese Language”, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.277.
^Bellwood, Peter (2006), "Asian Farming Diasporas? Agriculture, Languages, and Genes in China and Southeast Asia", Archaeology of Asia, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, pp. 96–118, doi:10.1002/9780470774670.ch6, ISBN 978-0-470-77467-0
^van Driem, George. (2011). Rice and the Austroasiatic and Hmong-Mien homelands. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Dynamics of Human Diversity: The Case of Mainland Southeast Asia (pp. 361-390). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
^Reconstructing Austroasiatic prehistory. In P. Sidwell & M. Jenny (Eds.), The Handbook of Austroasiatic Languages. Leiden: Brill. (Page 1: "Sagart (2011) and Bellwood (2013) favour the middle Yangzi"
^Sidwell, Paul. 2015. Phylogeny, innovations, and correlations in the prehistory of Austroasiatic. Paper presented at the workshop Integrating inferences about our past: new findings and current issues in the peopling of the Pacific and South East Asia, 22–23 June 2015, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany.
^Renfrew C, McMahon AMS, Trask RLBellwood P (2000) in Time Depth in Historical Linguistics, The time depth of major language families: An archaeologist's perspective, eds Renfrew C, McMahon AMS, Trask RL (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, UK), 1, pp 109–140.
^Bellwood P, Renfrew CMatson RG (2002) in Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis, The spread of maize agriculture in the U.S. Southwest, eds Bellwood P, Renfrew C (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, UK), pp 331–340.