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

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Some years back I listened to a story on NPR

that was looking at the change in language on a real-time basis. There was a project that involved recording people's spoken language, and then going back periodically, recording them again, and noting changes, especially in pronunciation.

This can be observed by watching old movies or TV shows. Earlier this evening I was watching some "What's My Line" shows from the 1950s and 60s, and some fifty or sixty years later, it's clear the accent has changed a bit.

Grammar and usage changes, and often it's all I can do not to correct people for what I consider errors of usage or grammar. The specifics aren't that important, as I recall English teachers trying to inculcate grammar and usage from their youth that had changed already.

Language changes. The grammar and usage nazis (like me) are often crazed by those changes.

One thing I've been thinking about for several decades is to what extent modern recording technology will slow those changes. There was a time when I thought it would, and I thought that the mingling of accents would level English. I no longer think so. While some extreme accents have been tamped down, it seems as if the spoken version of our language continues to diverge in different locales. I watch a fair amount of TV shows made in Great Britain, and I'm a bit astonished at vocabulary that is new to me, and although I can figure out the meaning from context, I'll be hearing words I never hear normally. Can't offhand think of any examples, sorry.