A recent northern origin for the Uto-Aztecan family

Abstract

The Uto-Aztecan language family is one of the largest language families in the Americas.However, there has been considerable debate about its origin and how it spread. Here we use Bayesian phylogenetic methods to analyze lexical data from 34 Uto-Aztecan varieties and 2 Kiowa-Tanoan languages. We infer the age of Proto-Uto-Aztecan to be around 4,100 years ago (3,258 -5,025 years), and identify the most likely homeland to be near what is now southern California. We reconstruct the most probable subsistence strategy in the ancestral Uto-Aztecan society and infer no casual or intensive cultivation, an absence of cereal crops, and a primary subsistence mode of gathering (rather than agriculture). Our results therefore support the timing, geography, and cultural practices of a northern origin, and are inconsistent with alternative scenarios.

Multiple evolutionary pressures shape identical consonant avoidance in the world’s languages

“…Data from five families were analyzed. These were Dravidian ( 83 – 85 ), Indo-European ( 77 , 86 , 87 ), Sino-Tibetan ( 88 , 89 ), Turkic ( 90 , 91 ), and Uto-Aztecan ( 92 ).…”

Open Problems in Computational Historical Linguistics

“…In evolutionary biology, for example, scholars have argued that the amount of genes that were horizontally transferred among species largely exceeds the amount of genes that were vertically inherited ( Dagan & Martin, 2006 ). Horizontal transfer is quite abundant in language history as well, and we usually base our phylogenetic studies on very small collections of basic words often not even exceeding 200 items per language ( Greenhill et al , 2023 ; Sagart et al , 2019 ). It would therefore be interesting to have a rough estimate of how many words of a language survive over time, but this would require (at the very least) a rough estimate of the words that constitute a language.…”