Paul Heggarty

Building social cognitive models of language change

Studies of language change have begun to contribute to answering several pressing questions in cognitive sciences, including the origins of human language capacity, the social construction of cognition and the mechanisms underlying culture change in general. Here, we describe recent advances within a new emerging framework for the study of language change, one that models such change as an evolutionary process among competing linguistic variants. We argue that a crucial and unifying element of this framework is the use of probabilistic, data-driven models both to infer change and to compare competing claims about social and cognitive influences on language change.

Splits or waves? Trees or webs? How divergence measures and network analysis can unravel language histories

Linguists have traditionally represented patterns of divergence within a language family in terms of either a ‘splits’ model, corresponding to a branching family tree structure, or the wave model, resulting in a (dialect) continuum. Recent phylogenetic analyses, however, have tended to assume the former as a viable idealization also for the latter. But the contrast matters, for it typically reflects different processes in the real world: speaker populations either separated by migrations, or expanding over continuous territory. Since history often leaves a complex of both patterns within the same language family, ideally we need a single model to capture both, and tease apart the respective contributions of each. The ‘network’ type of phylogenetic method offers this, so we review recent applications to language data. Most have used lexical data, encoded as binary or multi-state characters. We look instead at continuous distance measures of divergence in phonetics. Our output networks combine branch- and continuum-like signals in ways that correspond well to known histories (illustrated for Germanic, and particularly English). We thus challenge the traditional insistence on shared innovations, setting out a new, principled explanation for why complex language histories can emerge correctly from distance measures, despite shared retentions and parallel innovations.

The sound patterns of Englishes: Representing phonetic similarity

Linguists are able to describe, transcribe, and classify the differences and similarities between accents formally and precisely, but there has until very recently been no reliable and objective way of measuring degrees of difference. It is one thing to say how varieties are similar, but quite another to assess how similar they are. On the other hand, there has recently been a strong focus in historical linguistics on the development of quantitative methods for comparing and classifying languages; but these have tended to be applied to problems of language family membership, at rather high levels in the family tree, not down at the level of individual accents. In this article, we outline our attempts to address the question of relative similarity of accents using quantitative methods. We illustrate our method for measuring phonetic similarity in a sample of cognate words for a number of (mainly British) varieties of English, and show how these results can be displayed using newer and more innovative network diagrams, rather than trees. We consider some applications of these methods in tracking ongoing changes in English and beyond, and discuss future prospects.

Agriculture and Language Dispersals: Limitations, Refinements, and an Andean Exception?

Among the grandest and most controversial proposals for a holistic, cross‐disciplinary prehistory for humanity is the hypothesis that it was the adoption of agriculture that lay behind the dispersals of the world’s greatest language families. Conspicuous by its absence from this debate, however, is one of humanity’s rare independent hearths of agriculture and pristine civilization development: the Central Andes. Here we look to this region’s little‐known language prehistory, particularly the initial expansions of its two major indigenous language families, Quechua and Aymara. We then set these linguistic scenarios alongside archaeological evidence on where, when, and how agriculture originated here. The different time depths of these processes appear to preclude any simplistic cause‐and‐effect relationship between the two. Yet we go on to identify significant idiosyncrasies in the origins and development of food production in the Andes, which call for a number of refinements to the basic agriculture–language dispersal hypothesis. These are framed within a generalizing principle able to reconcile the appealing explanatory power of the hypothesis at great time depths with a reining in of any claims to unique and universal applicability in more recent times. The Andean case ends up transformed—an exception that more proves the rule than refutes it.

Mitochondrial DNA Variability in the Titicaca Basin: Matches and Mismatches with Linguistics and Ethnohistory

The Titicaca basin was the cradle of some of the major complex societies of pre‐Columbian South America and is today home to three surviving native languages: Quechua, Aymara, and Uro. This study seeks to contribute to reconstructing the population prehistory of the region, by providing a first genetic profile of its inhabitants, set also into the wider context of South American genetic background.

Linguistics for Archaeologists: Principles, Methods and the Case of the Incas

Like archaeologists, linguists and geneticists too use the data and methods of their disciplines to open up their own windows onto our past. These disparate visions of human prehistory cry out to be reconciled into a coherent holistic scenario, yet progress has long been frustrated by interdisciplinary disputes and misunderstandings (not least about Indo-European). In this article, a comparative-historical linguist sets out, to his intended audience of archaeologists, the core principles and methods of his discipline that are of relevance to theirs. They are first exemplified for the better-known languages of Europe, before being put into practice in a lesser-known case-study. This turns to the New World, setting its greatest indigenous ‘Empire’, that of the Incas, alongside its greatest surviving language family today, Quechua. Most Andean archaeologists assume a straightforward association between these two. The linguistic evidence, however, exposes this as nothing but a popular myth, and writes instead a wholly new script for the prehistory of the Andes — which now awaits an archaeological story to match.

The past, present and future of English dialects: Quantifying convergence, divergence and dynamic equilibrium

This article reports on research which seeks to compare and measure the similarities between phonetic transcriptions in the analysis of relationships between varieties of English. It addresses the question of whether these varieties have been converging, diverging, or maintaining equilibrium as a result of endogenous and exogenous phonetic and phonological changes. We argue that it is only possible to identify such patterns of change by the simultaneous comparison of a wide range of varieties of a language across a data set that has not been specifically selected to highlight those changes that are believed to be important. Our analysis suggests that although there has been an obvious reduction in regional variation with the loss of traditional dialects of English and Scots, there has not been any significant convergence (or divergence) of regional accents of English in recent decades, despite the rapid spread of a number of features such as TH-fronting.

What Role for Language Prehistory in Redefining Archaeological “Culture”? A Case Study on New Horizons in the Andes

Just as “cultures” and “peoples” have fallen from grace in archaeological theory, so too have simplistic attempts to associate them uniquely with any particular language – witness the furore surrounding “The Celts”. Rightly so; but equally, we should beware of throwing out with this bathwater the great potential of language prehistory to inform other disciplines of the human past, not least our own. Archaeology can only be the poorer for passing over the impressive degree of certainty that linguistic data and methodology can so often provide on one core component of human “cultural” makeup across time and space. Properly understood, language relationships can make for incontrovertibly clear evidence of provenience, continuity, and complex social interactions. Above all, languages do not diverge into great families at whim. On the contrary, they do so only for very good reasons in the real-world context in which their speakers lived. The very existence of language families with vast geographical distributions is no historical accident. Indeed, they demand to be accounted for, and can be only in terms of whatever powerful, expansive forces lie behind them. These, of course, are the same driving forces that archaeology seeks to uncover and explain through its own, independent material culture record. So it is not a question of whether any particular expansive forces in the archaeological record might have driven language expansions, provided we can find a perfect match – and if we cannot, then safely pretend that they never happened. Linguistics establishes without question that they did. For us to shy away from this linguistic reality is nothing less than an abnegation of our duty as prehistorians. The task, rather, is to identify which of the forces that archaeologists can detect provide that explanation most plausibly – and indeed to work out a methodology for how to judge that plausibility. In this chapter, then, we propose a new, principled methodology by which to converge archaeologists’ and linguists’ independent scenarios into a coherent cross-disciplinary tale of the human past. We discard facile associations between “culture” and “language”, but instead seek to link archaeological and linguistic data through commensurate driving forces. We illustrate this new methodology by a case study in one of humanity’s rare hearths of pristine civilization development, but where precious little interdisciplinary progress has been made hitherto: the Central Andes. The scenario that emerges turns on its head the traditional thinking on associations between the archaeology and languages of the region. And it duly offers archaeologists a new strand of independent data to contribute to their interpretation of precisely what the “cultural” Horizons they identify in the region really were.

Mining the data on the Huancayo-Huancavelica Quechua frontier

The traditional view of the linguistic prehistory of the Quechua family is founded on the assumption of a fundamental split between two deep branches, Quechua I and II. The validity of this classification is increasingly disputed, however, with critics arguing that the Quechua “Continuous Zone” shows not a split pattern but a dialect continuum, with the “missing link” to be found between the Central (QI) and Southern (QIIc) poles. Nonetheless, the region between Huancayo (southernmost QI) and Huancavelica (northernmost QIIc) provides the strongest evidence for a sharp QI~QII split, in the form of a relatively distinct linguistic frontier (or “isogloss bundle”).

Prehistory by Bayesian phylogenetics? The state of the art on Indo-European origins

Bayesian analysis has come to be widely used in archaeological chronologies and has been a regular feature of recent articles in Antiquity. Its application to linguistic prehistory, however, has proved controversial, in particular on the issue of Indo-European origins. Dating and mapping language distributions back into prehistory has an inevitable fascination, but has remained fraught with difficulty. This review of recent studies highlights the potential of increasingly sophisticated Bayesian phylogenetic models, while also identifying areas of concern, and ways in which the models might be refined to address them. Notwithstanding these remaining limitations, in the Indo-European case the results from Bayesian phylogenetics continue to reinforce the argument for an Anatolian rather than a Steppe origin.