Global language geography and language history: challenges and opportunities

Abstract

As the several thousand languages spoken by people all around the world became more and more systematically assessed and catalogued in the 20th century, it became clear that linguistic diversity is unevently distributed across the globe. Up to the present day, the reasons for that are poorly understood. Linguists are thus in the embarassing situation that they do not understand significant regularities in the way the objects of their study –languages– pattern; human sciences at large are faced with the fact that the way humans produce that key cultural product which is often seen as defining the essence of what makes them humans –language–remains in the dark. In this essay, I explore three interrelated strands of thought associated with the problem of explaining patterns in global language diversity to create a perspective that is different from those explored so far. First, I suggest that instead of looking at present-day levels of diversity and find parameters of variation between the regions in which they are spoken, we should take a process-based approach that looks into how these distributions were generated. Related to this point and in contradistinction to extant work, second, I advocate an inductive approach that departs from qualitative case studies which inform theory-building. Third, I ponder that, in contrast to the traditional focus of historical linguistics on language diversification and expansion, understanding how the ranges of languages are reduced might be the key missing piece of evidence in a global theory of language diversity and its genesis.