Out of Asia

Linguistic diversity is highly uneven in the world. Both in terms of languages and in terms of their structural features (properties of grammars), some world regions show strikingly higher diversity than other regions. One of the most puzzling differences is seen between Eurasia and the (pre-colonial) Americas. Eurasia shows large areas of relative structural homogeneity, with few but geographically far-flung language families, while the Americas reveal a rich patchwork of heterogeneity at varying scales and an abundance of small-scale families and isolates. How did the differences between Eurasia and the Americas arise, given their shared origins and connections?

Building on the previous Sinergia project LiMiTS, our Out of Asia project will provide new insights on the linguistic and human past of the Americas and Eurasia using an interdisciplinary approach based on (i) linguistic phylogenies, (ii) analyses of contact zones based on fine-grained typological data, (iii) genomic data of humans and domesticated plants and animals, and (iv) simulations.

This SNSF Sinergia project is headed by PIs Balthasar Bickel, Kentaro Shimizu, Robert Weibel, and Paul Widmer.

Software Releases

Kaiping, Gereon A. & Steiger, Melvin & Chousou-Polydouri, Natalia. 2021. Lexedata v1.0.0-alpha1. Zürich: Universität Zürich. (Python.) (https://pypi.org/project/lexedata/)

Communications

International conferences

Oral Presentations

Barbieri, Chiara. 2022. The genetic history of the southern Andes reconstructed from present day Mapuche ancestry. Presented at the EMBO | EMBL Symposium Reconstructing the human past: using ancient and modern genomics, Heidelberg, Germany, September 14.

Inman, David & Vuillermet, Marine. 2022. Singular-Plural stem alternation. A detailed semantic typology and global distribution. Presented at the 55th annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), University of Bucharest, August 23.

Rose, Françoise & Vuillermet, Marine. 2022. Genderlects: A (South) American feature?” Presented at the SSILA annual meeting, online, January 21.

Chousou-Polydouri, Natalia & van Dam, Kellen Parker & Inman, David & Vuillermet, Marine & Easterday, Shelece & Rose, Françoise & Bickel, Balthasar. 2021. Is there a typological profile of isolates, Workshop "Investigating language isolates: Typological and diachronic perspectives", 54th Annual meeting Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, August 31-September 3.

Chousou-Polydouri, Natalia & van Dam, Kellen Parker & Inman, David & Vuillermet, Marine & Easterday, Shelece & Rose, Françoise & Bickel, Balthasar. 2021. Mapping linguistic areas: a preliminary case study in Amazonia, Workshop "Multidisciplinary approaches to the Amazonian past",  Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA), University of Virginia (online) June 21-July 2. 

Michael, Lev & de Carvalho, Fernando O. & Chacon, Thiago & Rybka, Konrad & Sabogal, Andrés & Chousou-Polydouri, Natalia & Kaiping, Gereon. 2021. Interpreting the archaeological record to calibrate Arawakan linguistic phylogenies. Workshop "Multidisciplinary approaches to the Amazonian past",  Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA), University of Virginia (online) June 21-July 2.

Kaiping, Gereon & Chousou-Polydouri, Natalia & van Dam, Kellen Parker, & Steiger, Melvin. 2021. Lexedata: Tying existing software to CLDF Wordlists. Workshop on Model and evidence in quantitative comparative linguistics, 43rd Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society, Freiburg, Germany, February 25.

Poster Presentations

Rose, Françoise & Vuillermet, Marine & van Dam, Kellen Parker. 2021. Reassessing the areality of sociative causation. Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, January 7.

Barbieri, Chiara. 2020. Genetic relationships and linguistic diversity in present-day populations of South America. Los Angeles, USA – AAPA annual meeting (online).

Invited seminars

Barbieri, Chiara, Urban, Matthias & Rademaker, Kurt. 2021. The languages of the Andes. Archaeology and language workshop, Jena, Germany (online). November.

Barbieri, Chiara. 2021. Matches and mismatches between human genetic history and language diversity. The molecular anthropology of language workshop, Zurich, Switzerland, September.

Chousou-Polydouri, Natalia & Inman, David. 2020. Multi-dimensional coding for possession constructions, Dilis - Morphosyntaxe, Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage, Lyon, France, December 1.

Inman, David & Kaiping, Gereon. 2020. Mapping linguistic areas in the Americas and lexedata. Untangling the Linguistic Past of the Americas, MPI-Jena / PUCP / IVS-UZH. September 23.

See also the publications of the related earlier project LiMiTS

Publications outside of ZORA

Matsumae, H., P. E. Savage, P. Ranacher, D. E. Blasi, T. E. Currie, T. Sato, A. Tajima, S. Brown, M. Stoneking, K. K. Shimizu, H. Oota & B. Bickel. 2019. Exploring deep-time relationships between cultural and genetic evolution in Northeast Asia. BioRxiv, doi:10.1101/513929.