Geography and Spatial Analysis in Historical Linguistics

Abstract

Spatial patterns associated with language contact, language spread, and isolation have been included, albeit peripherally, in traditional theories of historical linguistics. The development of mapping and spatial analysis tools, combined with innovations in quantitative approaches to diachronic linguistics, has introduced a new era in linguistic geography. Geographic research in historical linguistics, however, is largely carried out in the separate traditions of various linguistic subfields. Many commonalities exist between the questions asked and the methods applied in each of these subfields, and increased interaction across dialectometry, phylogenetics, and areal linguistics has the potential to reinvigorate linguistic geography and accelerate progress on questions about geography and the spatial outcomes of language change and language expansion.

Parasites and politics: why cross-cultural studies must control for relatedness, proximity and covariation

“…However, not all languages have available phylogenies, and the relationship between language families is a matter of debate [38,89,90]. Placing states in a hierarchy of relatedness using the taxonomy of each state's predominant language provides a convenient and tractable way to estimate covariance due to descent [38,40,41,88,[91][92][93]. For each state, we identified the primary language spoken from information in Ethnologue [79].…”

“…In addition to considering the relatedness of cultures, we also need to take their spatial proximity into account, particularly when we are interested in the influence of environmental variables like climate, or aspects of biodiversity such as pathogen prevalence [ 3 , 39 , 40 ]. Neighbouring states are interconnected in many ways that can influence their cultural and social attributes, and shape the trajectories of cultural and economic change [ 41 – 43 ].…”

Geography and linguistics: Histories, entanglements and departures

“…Wagner's charge against his colleagues was that geographers, not only linguists, should be more concerned with the operation of language in space, considering the importance of space in shaping linguistic usage, variation, change and ideologies. This boundary has largely been entrenched today, so “whereas linguists are interested in the internal workings of language systems, geographers tend to treat language as a unitary variable and have not engaged significantly in research on its internal complexity” (Haynie, 2014, p.344). Linguistic geographymight have been more narrowly understood by Wagner than what it means today, it is nevertheless a significant part of geography's heritage.…”

“…(Kretzschmar, 2018, p.69). In spite of this, maps remain a useful tool for representing the geography of a language especially with the advent of digital methods such as GIS (see Haynie, 2014, for a detailed review of the potential benefits of applying spatial theories and techniques to historical linguistics). Moreover, Kretzschmar (2018) points to the documents, paper records and other survey materials gathered in the process of creating linguistic atlases and maps as an untapped "metadata" for historical linguists, and potentially, historical geographers.…”

Best practices for spatial language data harmonization, sharing and map creation—A case study of Uralic

“…Linguistic research has often concentrated on non-spatial aspects [ 6 ], and geographical inventories grew in number as late as in the 19th century [ 7 ]. Many of the first maps depicting the distribution of languages (often labeled as language area or speaker area) were actually illustrations of the locations of different ethnic groups [ 8 – 10 ], at a time when ethnic and linguistic identity were strongly connected.…”