In recent years, linguists have begun to increasingly rely on quantitative phylogenetic approaches to examine language evolution. Some linguists have questioned the suitability of phylogenetic approaches on the grounds that linguistic evolution is largely reticulate due to extensive lateral transmission, or borrowing, among languages. The problem may be particularly pronounced in hunter-gatherer languages, where the conventional wisdom among many linguists is that lexical borrowing rates are so high that tree building approaches cannot provide meaningful insights into evolutionary processes. However, this claim has never been systematically evaluated, in large part because suitable data were unavailable. In addition, little is known about the subsistence, demographic, ecological, and social factors that might mediate variation in rates of borrowing among languages. Here, we evaluate these claims with a large sample of hunter-gatherer languages from three regions around the world. In this study, a list of 204 basic vocabulary items was collected for 122 hunter-gatherer and small-scale cultivator languages from three ecologically diverse case study areas: northern Australia, northwest Amazonia, and California and the Great Basin. Words were rigorously coded for etymological (inheritance) status, and loan rates were calculated. Loan rate variability was examined with respect to language area, subsistence mode, and population size, density, and mobility; these results were then compared to the sample of 41 primarily agriculturalist languages in [1]. Though loan levels varied both within and among regions, they were generally low in all regions (mean 5.06%, median 2.49%, and SD 7.56), despite substantial demographic, ecological, and social variation. Amazonian levels were uniformly very low, with no language exhibiting more than 4%. Rates were low but more variable in the other two study regions, in part because of several outlier languages where rates of borrowing were especially high. High mobility, prestige asymmetries, and language shift may contribute to the high rates in these outliers. No support was found for claims that hunter-gatherer languages borrow more than agriculturalist languages. These results debunk the myth of high borrowing in hunter-gatherer languages and suggest that the evolution of these languages is governed by the same type of rules as those operating in large-scale agriculturalist speech communities. The results also show that local factors are likely to be more critical than general processes in determining high (or low) loan rates.

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The linguistic map of Amazonia presents a startling jumble of languages and language families. While some families – most notably Carib, Arawak, Macro‐Jê, and Tupí– are distributed widely throughout the region, their spread is interspersed with many dozens of tiny, localized families and language isolates, particularly in the Amazonian periphery. At the same time, distributions of lexical, grammatical, and phonological features suggest that this linguistic patchwork is overlaid in places by contact regions, where multilingualism has fostered lexical and/or structural resemblances among languages. This complex distribution of languages and linguistic features presents many challenges to our understanding of Amazonian prehistory. How did Amazonia's language families arrive at their present distribution? Why did some families spread over huge distances, while others came to occupy only tiny geographical pockets or are limited to a single language? What kinds of interactions among peoples led to the formation of contact zones, and how are these regions defined? Complicating these questions further is the fact that very little is known about many Amazonian languages, and relationships among them are in many cases a matter of conjecture. This article surveys our current understanding of language classification and language contact in Amazonia, and addresses various perspectives concerning the implications of these relationships for Amazonian prehistory.

Numerals in many languages around the world can be argued to reflect a progressive build-up of historical stages (cf. Hurford 1987), each of which may also represent the synchronic upper limit of a numeral system in another language. This paper presents an intriguing test case of this claim by exploring the historical development of numerals in the languages of the Nadahup (Makú) family of the northwest Amazonian Vaupés region, in which the numeral strategies that can be inferred diachronically for one language are also represented synchronically in its sisters. The paper also demonstrates that even the most basic of the Nadahup numerals have transparent etymologies (a cross-linguistically unusual feature suggestive of their relatively recent development), and that areal diffusion contributed to the expansion of the systems, supporting the characterization of the Vaupés as a linguistic area.