Language on the edge of the Pacific: structures and stories
Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages
The Pacific region is where we have proof of early language use, in the form of early societies cohesive enough to divide tasks and create ocean-going seacraft. Evidence for human settlement by sea voyaging predates all modern language families; can linguistic investigation uncover any ancient signals in the languages of the Pacific from the millenia following settlement? Extensive social reformations on the mainlands of Eurasia and the Americas have reduced the information we can uncover in most areas to the Holocene, but there is evidence that earlier linguistic ecologies can be discovered through structural analysis. In the Pacific, separated to some extent from the ethnographic transformations that upset pre-Holocene societies across most of the Old World, we have a chance of uncovering ancient signals about linguistic ecologies with less disruption, and contemporary ‘normalisation’, than is found in larger land masses.
In the Pacific we find a prescriptively uniform Austronesian language family occupying most of the land area, surrounding New Guinea, with multiple language families, and Australia, with at least multiple typological norms. Within the Austronesian family, however, we find a great deal of diversity, making it possible to generate numerous hypotheses concerning ancient linguistic ecologies, and then examine them in terms of data from other disciplines. This is only possible by examining linguistic structures outside the Pacific; the ‘edge of the Pacific’ refers to the languages that allow us to investigate the pacific languages: the languages of the eastern edge of East and Southeast Asia, the languages of Australia, and to a lesser extent the western edge of the Americas. Taking case studies from within the Pacific and from areas on the edge, both large and small, and conducting simple objective structural analysis on large amounts of data, allows us to create a typology of language similarities, differences, and diversities. Calibrating these methodologies with case studies from areas with known histories affords us the possibility of learning how to investigate large amounts of data, understanding the possibilities for regional and genealogical patterns, and identifying areas with ‘suspicious’ patterns for more qualitative investigation of the stories about ancient cultural movements that can be revealed globally.
Each dot represents one language; the colours represent the first three dimensions of variation in terms of morphosyntactic properties. Family boundaries are not detectable, while areas are clearly, defined, though in gradients rather than categories.
Links to the video recordings: