Linguistic Areas, Linguistic Convergence and River Systems in South America

Anthropology

“…Since divergence is cumulative through time, the default implication is that Arawak has been dispersing and diverging for longer than the two millennia since the spread of Roman(i)ce, and Quechua for a little less than that. (Linguists have long been Figure 1.2.2 Zones of especially intense language interaction ('linguistic convergence areas') within South America, based on Beresford- Jones and Heggarty (2012b) for the Andes, and on Epps and Michael (2017) for the lowland languages. © Paul Heggarty.…”

“…For Hornborg (2005), Arawak was spread across a water-borne trade network, and thus mostly by cultural processes and adoption, rather than by some major population expansion and migration, and without needing any expansive 'state' society behind it. (Rivers have also been suggested as conduits for the contrasting process of language convergence, but the evidence seems poor: see van Gijn et al (2017).) Secondly, rivers were crucial to subsistence regimes that came to rely on farming the rich alluvial soils along várzea floodplains.…”

“…Moving on to deeper interaction effects that extend beyond the lexicon into the sound and grammatical systems of the languages affected, South America is home to 'linguistic convergence areas' (see Chapter 1.3), on different levels of scale and intensity. Epps and Michael (2017) survey multiple localized pockets of intense linguistic convergence in the lowlands, such as the Upper Xingú region and the spectacular case of linguistic exogamy (where there is a convention against marrying somebody of the same native language) in the Vaupés region. In the Andean Altiplano, meanwhile, there is localized and especially intense convergence between the southern varieties of Aymara and Quechua.…”

“…Their presentation has not gone unchallenged, however. Others have objected that not all of Dixon and Aikhenvald's criteria really hold so widely across the languages of Amazonia anyway (see Chapter 3.5;Epps and Michael 2017), and that there is in fact a significant eastwest shift in structural characteristics within Amazonia itself. Rival proposals see the major division through the continent as one that would put western Amazonia if anything together with the Andes, and opposed to eastern South America as a whole (see Chapter 3.5 by Van Gijn and Muysken, and Van Gijn et al 2017).…”

“…Others have objected that not all of Dixon and Aikhenvald's criteria really hold so widely across the languages of Amazonia anyway (see Chapter 3.5;Epps and Michael 2017), and that there is in fact a significant eastwest shift in structural characteristics within Amazonia itself. Rival proposals see the major division through the continent as one that would put western Amazonia if anything together with the Andes, and opposed to eastern South America as a whole (see Chapter 3.5 by Van Gijn and Muysken, and Van Gijn et al 2017). An intermediate view is that both dividing lines have support in different selections of structural characteristics, which together give a three-way division of Andes versus western Amazonia versus eastern Amazonia.…”