Dynamics of Hunter-Gatherer Language Change

在人类历史的绝大部分时间里，世界各地的人们都是以狩猎和采集的方式生活在小的社会群体中，而不是生活在城镇或村庄中。农业被认为是近年来人口扩张的驱动力：在最强烈的主张中，几乎所有现有的语系最终都因为农业扩张而具有工业化前的分布。虽然农业和与之相关的语言的传播最近引起了很多关注，但关于狩猎采集者语言的相应工作却很少。对于我们全面理解社会动态来说，重要的是分析是什么驱动了狩猎采集者之间的变化和传播，并确定这些过程是否与1万年前农业革命后发生的情况不同。来自美国、加拿大、新西兰和澳大利亚的研究人员将合作，比较三大洲（北美、南美和澳大利亚）的狩猎采集群体。在北美和南美，一些狩猎采集语言已经传播到很远的地方，但农业和相关语言也广泛传播，在某些情况下，农民恢复了觅食。在澳大利亚，向农业的过渡从未发生过，但有一种语系传播得非常广泛。遗传学、语言学、人类学和考古学的结果将结合起来，以澄清移民和语言转变对语言传播的相对贡献。要收集的语言数据包括植物和动物领域的词汇，亲属关系和社会组织。

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.