Language Dispersal, Diversification, and Contact

Mily Crevels · Pieter Muysken

Jul 2020 · Oxford University Press

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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.

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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).