Chapter 2 Tongues, Texts, and Scripts 47East Asian Homelands
The great success of reconstructing the Indo-European language family has
naturally led linguists who work in East and Southeast Asia to attempt similar
reconstructions there. But in this part of the world the complexities are much
greater and the time-depth deeper. There have been far fewer linguists at work
on far more languages, and the effort has only begun in the last century. This
means that at the present time there is still much uncertainty and disagreement,
though some general outlines are beginning to emerge, and we intend to pres-
ent a picture that is a good deal firmer and clearer than many experts would
prefer. This emerging picture has come about as other kinds of scholars, partic-
ularly archaeologists, have brought their data to bear on questions also of inter-
est to linguists.
For instance, as soon as languages have been shown by linguists to be mem-
bers of a language family, we want to know where the original mother tongue
was spoken, when it was spoken, and why and how the languages began moving
to where we now find them. With such questions, obviously, archaeology can be
helpful. The archaeological record of excavated sites can be examined for impor-
tant clues about the people. For instance, were they foragers or cultivators? What
is the geographical range within which a typical assemblage of artifacts is found?
What is the physical type of the human remains? What seems to have been the
population densities? How long were sites inhabited by the same people?
What, for instance, would cause a population to disperse? This is the first
stage in the breakup of a language into a number of daughter languages.
According to archaeologist Colin Renfrew (1989), there are four principal ways
by which populations, together with their languages, spread. First, there were
the earliest periods of human dispersal, when people settled in previously unin-
habited territories, leaving the African homeland and moving throughout most
of Eurasia, Australia, and New Guinea. In some parts of the world, for exam-
ple the eastern Pacific islands, this has happened recently enough that we have
quite a lot of knowledge about the peoples and their languages. In Asia, those
earliest Homo sapiens, we are certain, must have had some language, if only we
could rediscover its traces in modern languages.
This initial migration was followed by the “farming dispersal.” The inven-
tion of farming in various places caused population growth, and as these agri-
cultural populations expanded at the expense of earlier foragers, they took their
languages with them. The full impact of these dispersals is only now coming to
be recognized by historical linguists. For instance, Renfrew has argued that the
Indo-European dispersal was not by mounted warriors of the steppes but by the
earlier agriculturists of the Middle East, very well documented archaeologi-
cally, who moved from the Mediterranean north into Europe, displacing earlier
foragers (leaving the Basques as a lonely remnant), and also eastward into the
Iranian Plateau and India. (Historians of India are not yet accepting this
hypothesis, however; if and when they do, it will require radical rethinking of
early Indian history.)