Combining linguistics, archaeology and ancient genetics to understand deep human history

[Judi Lynn]

How old is your language?

Michael Dunn and Annemarie Verkerk | Apr 9 2018 | comment

It’s difficult to understand what people mean when they say that a language is “old”. A person is old who was born a long time ago, but a language is recreated by its speakers every generation – so every generation, it changes.

It’s easier, though, to assign an age to a language family. By definition, a group of related languages ultimately descend from a common ancestor, and this common ancestor must have existed at some particular time. This language must have come from somewhere, too, of course, but we simply don’t have any linguistic evidence for what came before.

Until recently, working out how old language families are was based on informed extrapolations of specialists. But modern computational methods in linguistics can now let us infer the ages of language families in a more exact manner. These new methods, for example, recently let us propose a new age for the Dravidian language family: 4,500 years.

Since the mid-19th century it has been recognised that most of the 462 languages of India belong to two main stocks: the Dravidian family and the Indo-European family. More than a billion people live in India. Of these, about 20% speak a Dravidian language, such as Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada. Meanwhile,75% speak an Indo-European one, including Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu.

More:
https://www.mercatornet.com/features/view/combining-linguistics-archaeology-and-ancient-genetics-to-understand-deep-h/21205