The Bantu expansion transformed the linguistic, economic, and cultural composition of sub-Saharan Africa. However, the exact dates and routes taken by the ancestors of the speakers of the more than ...500 current Bantu languages remain uncertain. Here, we use the recently developed “break-away” geographical diffusion model, specially designed for modeling migrations, with “augmented” geographic information, to reconstruct the Bantu language family expansion. This Bayesian phylogeographic approach with augmented geographical data provides a powerful way of linking linguistic, archaeological, and genetic data to test hypotheses about large language family expansions. We compare four hypotheses: an early major split north of the rainforest; a migration through the Sangha River Interval corridor around 2,500 BP; a coastal migration around 4,000 BP; and a migration through the rainforest before the corridor opening, at 4,000 BP. Our results produce a topology and timeline for the Bantu language family, which supports the hypothesis of an expansion through Central African tropical forests at 4,420 BP (4,040 to 5,000 95% highest posterior density interval), well before the Sangha River Interval was open.
The movements of ideas and content between locations and languages are unquestionably crucial concerns to researchers of the information age, and Twitter has emerged as a central, global platform on ...which hundreds of millions of people share knowledge and information. A variety of research has attempted to harvest locational and linguistic metadata from tweets to understand important questions related to the 300 million tweets that flow through the platform each day. Much of this work is carried out with only limited understandings of how best to work with the spatial and linguistic contexts in which the information was produced, however. Furthermore, standard, well-accepted practices have yet to emerge. As such, this article studies the reliability of key methods used to determine language and location of content in Twitter. It compares three automated language identification packages to Twitter's user interface language setting and to a human coding of languages to identify common sources of disagreement. The article also demonstrates that in many cases user-entered profile locations differ from the physical locations from which users are actually tweeting. As such, these open-ended, user-generated profile locations cannot be used as useful proxies for the physical locations from which information is published to Twitter.
The political economy of linguistic cleavages Desmet, Klaus; Ortuño-Ortín, Ignacio; Wacziarg, Romain
Journal of development economics,
03/2012, Volume:
97, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper uses a linguistic tree, describing the genealogical relationship between all 6912 world languages, to compute measures of diversity at different levels of linguistic aggregation. By doing ...so, we let the data inform us on which linguistic cleavages are most relevant for a range of political economy outcomes, rather than making ad hoc choices. We find that deep cleavages, originating thousands of years ago, lead to better predictors of civil conflict and redistribution. The opposite pattern emerges when it comes to the impact of linguistic diversity on growth and public goods provision, where finer distinctions between languages matter.
This volume discusses the characteristics and dynamics of urban language use, considering aspects such as contact, variation and change, as well as identity, indexicality, attitudes, and spatial ...factors including mobility, (counter-)urbanisation and diffusion processes. It presents modern methodological and conceptual ideas as well as new findings.
This book examines how youths at a martial arts club in an urban setting participate and interact in a recreational social community. The author relates analyses of their interactions to discussions ...of relevance to the sociology of sports, anthropology and education, ultimately providing an analytically nuanced contribution to the field.
This paper examines the Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), a monumental exercise supervised by George Grierson to survey and classify the languages of colonial India. It considers why the LSI ...developed into an atypical scheme that corresponded with a multiethnic and multinational network of officials and scholars to survey India's languages. It makes the case that the networked practice of surveying was reciprocated at different scales, from localised linguistic surveys in districts and princely states to gather information and specimens, to a loosely governed transnational exercise involving Indians and Europeans to edit, review and publish results. The paper argues that the LSI's scalar geographies were negotiated by Grierson and, more importantly, his assistant Gauri Kant Roy and demonstrates that scale, as an analytic or process, was not an abstraction or predetermined for those entangled in the LSI's survey of India's languages.
•Examines the Linguistic Survey of India from a historical geography perspective.•Highlights the LSI's uniqueness as a colonial Indian survey.•Draws on underutilised materials from National Archives of India.•Proposes a scalar and networked approach to the history of science and surveying.•Emphasises the significance of Gauri Kant Roy and various Indian surveyors in shaping India's linguistic geography.
The first decades of the 21st century have witnessed a renewed interest in the relationship between language structure and the various social and ecological niches in which the languages of the world ...are used and against the background of which they evolved. In this context, Everett (2013) argued for direct geographical influences on the sound structure of languages. It was observed that ejective consonants, produced with a sudden burst of non-pulmonic air to a salient acoustic effect, tend to occur in high-altitude environments in which these sounds may be adaptive due to a reduced articulatory effort and/or to prevent desiccation. Here, we evaluate this claim and at the same time place it into a broader context. We observe that the distribution of another class of typologically unusual sounds, uvulars, is highly similar to that of ejectives, but that the proposed explanations are not available to account for the similar geographical patterning of uvulars. Hence, we test an alternative explanatory account that would posit indirect rather than direct environmental influences on language structure that are mediated by anthropological factors, in particular the relative sociolinguistic isolation of speech communities at the highest altitudes. Applying Bayesian Logistic Mixed Effects Regression to a large database of phonological inventories of the world's languages, however, we do not find strong support for either a correlation of ejectives or uvulars with high-altitude environments, though the association is somewhat stronger for ejectives than uvulars. A phylogenetic exploration of the development of both classes of sounds in two large language families spoken in widely different environments, Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan, together with a qualitative assessment of the dedicated literature, in contrast, suggests a strong role of language contact rather than environmental factors.
The Slavic branch of the Balto-Slavic sub-family of Indo-European languages underwent rapid divergence as a result of the spatial expansion of its speakers from Central-East Europe, in early medieval ...times. This expansion-mainly to East Europe and the northern Balkans-resulted in the incorporation of genetic components from numerous autochthonous populations into the Slavic gene pools. Here, we characterize genetic variation in all extant ethnic groups speaking Balto-Slavic languages by analyzing mitochondrial DNA (n = 6,876), Y-chromosomes (n = 6,079) and genome-wide SNP profiles (n = 296), within the context of other European populations. We also reassess the phylogeny of Slavic languages within the Balto-Slavic branch of Indo-European. We find that genetic distances among Balto-Slavic populations, based on autosomal and Y-chromosomal loci, show a high correlation (0.9) both with each other and with geography, but a slightly lower correlation (0.7) with mitochondrial DNA and linguistic affiliation. The data suggest that genetic diversity of the present-day Slavs was predominantly shaped in situ, and we detect two different substrata: 'central-east European' for West and East Slavs, and 'south-east European' for South Slavs. A pattern of distribution of segments identical by descent between groups of East-West and South Slavs suggests shared ancestry or a modest gene flow between those two groups, which might derive from the historic spread of Slavic people.
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