Abstract
Author SummaryAbout one-fifth of all the world's languages are spoken in present day Australia, New Guinea, and the surrounding islands. This corresponds to the boundaries of the ancient continent of Sahul, which broke up due to rising sea levels about 9000 years before present. The distribution of languages in this region conveys information about its population history. The recent migration of the Austronesian speakers can be traced with precision, but the histories of the Papuan and Australian language speakers are considerably more difficult to reconstruct. The speakers of these languages are presumably descendants of the first migrations into Sahul, and their languages have been subject to many millennia of dispersal and contact. Due to the antiquity of these language families, there is insufficient lexical evidence to reconstruct their histories. Instead we use abstract structural features to infer population history, modeling language change as a result of both inheritance and horizontal diffusion. We use a Bayesian phylogenetic clustering method, originally developed for investigating genetic recombination to infer the contribution of different linguistic lineages to the current diversity of languages. The results show the underlying structure of the diversity of these languages, reflecting ancient dispersals, millennia of contact, and probable phylogenetic groups. The analysis identifies 10 ancestral language populations, some of which can be identified with previously known phylogenetic groups (language families or subgroups), and some of which have not previously been proposed.
Highlights
The recent migration of the Austronesian speakers can be traced with precision, but the histories of the Papuan and Australian language speakers are considerably more difficult to reconstruct
The results show the underlying structure of the diversity of these languages, reflecting ancient dispersals, millennia of contact, and probable phylogenetic groups
The analysis identifies 10 ancestral language populations, some of which can be identified with previously known phylogenetic groups, and some of which have not previously been proposed
Summary
Following an earlier study [14,16] that investigated possible historical scenarios for both Oceanic and Papuan languages of Island Melanesia on the basis of abstract structural features, we coded a total of 121 languages for 160 characters, 155 of which are binary, one is four-state, and four are three-state characters, using a revised questionnaire compared with the one in [14,16]. The classification of the Papuan languages follows the preliminary results obtained by Ross [6] on the basis of comparison and reconstruction of pronominal paradigms. The classification of the Australian languages is based on [3] and [22]. The sources of language data are listed in Text S2, and the coded linguistic data are presented in Dataset S1
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