Lecture
The spread of Sino-Tibetan languages, agriculture and weaving in East Asia
- Date
- Tuesday 7 July 2026
- Time
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.11
Abstract
The spread of several language families has been hypothesized to result from agricultural and demographic transitions that drove populations outwards from agricultural centres of origin via demic diffusion (Bellwood 2002). In the case of East Asia, this farming/language dispersal hypothesis conflicts with another approach to infer the Urheimat of language families, one based on centers of maximal phylogenetic diversity (Sapir 1916): whereas archaeobotanical evidence points to the Upper Yellow river basin as being the most likely homeland of the Sino-Tibetan/Trans-Himalayan family (Jacques and Stevens 2024), this area has a very low linguistic diversity. By contrast, the region of highest phylogenetic diversity has been argued to lie in North-Eastern India (Blench and Post 2014), where little archaeobotanical data is available. This presentation summarizes evidence from Sino-Tibetan etymology, crops, and spindle whorls to evaluate the relative support of the two hypotheses, and outlines the outstanding problems that remain to be explored.
References:
- Bellwood Peter 2002. Farmers, foragers, languages, genes: The genesis of agricultural societies, in Bellwood Peter, Renfrew Colin (Eds.), Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, pp. 17-28.
- Blench, Roger and Mark W. Post. 2014. Rethinking Sino-Tibetan phylogeny from the perspective of North East Indian languages. In Nathan W.Hill and Thomas Owen Smith (eds.), Trans-Himalayan Linguistics, 71–104. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Jacques, Guillaume and Chris Stevens. 2024. Linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence suggests multiple agriculture-driven migrations of Sino-Tibetan speakers from Northern China to the Indian subcontinent. Quaternary International 711(30). 1–20. doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2024.09.001.
- Sapir, Edward. 1916. Time perspective in aboriginal american culture. Ottawa: Geological Survey, Department of Mines, Government Printing Bureau.
This lecture is part of the Summer School in Languages and Linguistics, but is open to anyone who is interested.