Dynamics of Hunter-Gatherer Language Change

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For the vast majority of human history, people all over the world have lived in small social groups as hunters and gatherers, and not in towns or villages. Agriculture has been claimed to be the driving force for recent population expansions: in the strongest claims, almost all current language families ultimately have their pre-industrial distribution because of agricultural expansion. While the spread of farming and languages associated with it has claimed a lot of recent attention, there has been very little corresponding work on the languages of hunter-gatherers. It is important for our overall understanding of social dynamics to analyze what drives change and spread among hunter-gatherers and determine whether such processes are different from what occurred after the farming revolution, 10,000 years ago. Researchers from the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia will collaborate on work comparing hunter-gatherer groups on three continents (North America, South America, and Australia). In North and South America, some hunter-gatherer languages have spread over large distances, but farming and associated languages have also spread widely, and in some cases farmers reverted to foraging. In Australia, the transition to farming never took place but one language family spread very widely. Results from genetics, linguistics, anthropology and archaeology will be combined to clarify what the relative contributions of migration and language shift were to language spreads. Among the linguistic data to be collected are vocabulary in the fields of plants and animals, and kinship and social organization.