The Rise and Fall of Languages

Abstract

This book puts forward a different approach to language change, the punctuated equilibrium model. This is based on the premise that during most of the 100,000 or more years that humans have had language, states of equilibrium have existed during which linguistic features diffused across the languages in a given area so that they gradually converged on a common prototype. From time to time, the state of equilibrium would be punctuated, with expansion and split of peoples and of languages, most recently, as a result of European colonisation and the globalisation of communication which are likely to result in the extinction, within the next hundred years, of 90% of the languages currently spoken. Professor Dixon suggests that every linguist should assume a responsibility for documenting some of these languages before they disappear.

The political economy of linguistic cleavages

“…Linguistic drift tends to be faster in smaller populations. For instance, Lithgow (1973) studies the Muyuw language, spoken on Woodlark Island (New Guinea): 13% of the Muyuw vocabulary was replaced in a period of 50 years during the middle of the 20th Century (see also Dixon, 1997, for a discussion). This language is spoken by only 6000 individuals, according to Ethnologue.…”

Gene flow across linguistic boundaries in Native North American populations

“…They argue that a process consisting of population fissions, expansion into new territories, and isolation between ancestral and descendant groups will produced a tree-like structure common to both genes and languages. Linguists agree that population fissions and range expansions play an important role in the generation of linguistic diversity (8)(9)(10). The correlation between patterns of linguistic and genetic variation has been studied by many researchers in different world regions with mixed positive (11)(12)(13)(14) and negative (15)(16)(17) findings.…”

Tradição Oral, Narrativa e Sociedade

“…41 As mudanças por difusão seriam aquelas decorrentes das trocas miúdas entre fronteiras, que causam mudanças, mas o fazem lentamente. Dixon (1997) entende que esse processo de mudança social geraria grandes áreas culturais homogêneas -lembrando sempre que ele refere principalmente às mudanças linguísticas -, tais como ele encontrou no oeste australiano ou nas terras baixas da Amazônia. As outras mudanças, que ocorreriam por pontuação, decorreriam de grandes e repentinas mudanças ambientais, tais como inundações, invasões, terremotos, descobertas tecnológicas, epidemias, etc.…”