Long-term social interaction is reflected in parallel linguistic structures among the languages of the lower Amazon

Summary

A central concept in historical linguistics is that of the sprachbund, or linguistic area, where languages of different families show shared structural traits as a result of long-term social interaction rather than shared inheritance. Through language contact phenomena such as bilingualism, calquing, the formation of trade languages, etc., this process of linguistic diffusion and convergence sometimes flies under the scientific radar, especially in regions such as Amazonia where there tend to be cultural restrictions against widespread lexical borrowing. In this talk I examine the validity of the lower Amazon as a sprachbund by comparing the structural patterns found in a sample of 20 languages from 8 different languages families of the lower Amazon with those found in a continent-wide sample of over 90 languages from across more than 40 different language families (cf. www.sails.clld.org). Statistical testing of the geographic distribution of linguistic traits is used to delineate possible zones of sociolinguistic interaction, which can then be compared with other reflexes of regional integration from an ethnological and archaeological perspective.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Ceramics, Identity and Regional Interaction in the Lower Amazon

Keywords

Spatial Coverage