Linguistic homeland

Urheimat (a German compound of Ur- "primitive, original" and Heimat "home, homeland"; German pronunciation: [ˈʔuːɐ̯ˌhaɪmaːt], English: /ˈʊərhaɪmɑːt/) is a linguistic term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language.

Language families predominantly found in Europe, North Asia and South Asia

Indo-European homeland

Main article: Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses

Scholars have tried to identify the homeland of the Proto-Indo-European language, to which the term Urheimat is most frequently applied. Possibly relevant geographical indicators are common words for "beech" and "salmon" (while there is no common word for "lion", for example—the fact so many European words for "lion" are similar-looking cognates is due to more recent borrowings). Many hypotheses for an Urheimat have been proposed, and Mallory (1989:143) said, “One does not ask ‘where is the Indo-European homeland?’ but rather ‘where do they put it now?’”

Mallory (1997:106) states that current discussion of the Indo-European homeland problem is largely confined to four basic models, with variations; these are, in chronological order:

• Baltic-Pontic(-Caspian): Mesolithic
• Anatolia: Early Neolithic, circa 6th to 5th millennia BC
• Central Europe-Balkans: Early Neolithic, c. 5th millennium BC
• Pontic-Caspian (aka the Kurgan hypothesis): Eneolithic, c. 5th to 4th millennia BC

Another theory for the Indo European homeland states that the original home land was in India, and later spread outwards. This theory contrasts with the mainstream model, but is widespread among Hindu nationalists.

• Indian subcontinent: Indian Urheimat Theory
• Indigenous Aryans

Other, less-widely accepted models include the Armenian hypothesis (suggested by Soviet scholars in the 1980s), the Paleolithic Continuity Theory (suggested by Italian "paleolinguist" Mario Alinei in the 1990s), and the Out of India theory (historically suggested by Friedrich Schlegel).

Indo-Iranian homeland

The Proto-Indo-Iranians are widely identified with the bearers of the Andronovo horizon of the late 3rd and early 2nd millennia BC.

Balto-Slavic homeland

The Balto-Slavic homeland largely corresponds to the historical distribution of Baltic and Slavic, Proto-Baltic likely emerging in the eastern parts of the Corded Ware horizon.

The Slavic homeland likely corresponds to the distribution of the oldest recognisably-Slavic hydronyms, found in northern and western Ukraine and southern Belarus.

Balkans dialects

Further information: Paleo-Balkans languages and Balkan linguistics

The history of the Daco-Thracian/Thraco-Illyrian dialects of the Balkans is obscure. The Phrygian, Macedonian, and Greek proto-languages likely also originate in the Balkans. Proto-Armenian may also be Balkans (Greco-Phrygian) derived, or at least strongly influenced by a Phrygian substrate. The Phrygian influence on [pre-]Proto-Armenian would date to about the 7th century BC, in the context of the declining kingdom of Urartu.

Centum dialects

Further information: Beaker culture, Old European hydronymy, and Centum Satem isogloss

Celtic homeland

The Proto-Celtic homeland is usually located in the Early Iron Age Hallstatt culture of northern Austria. There is a broad consensus that the center of the La Tène culture lay on the northwest edges of the Hallstatt culture. Pre-La Tène (6th to 5th century BC) Celtic expansions reached Great Britain and Ireland (Insular Celtic) and Gaul. La Tène groups expanded in the 4th century BC to Hispania, the Po Valley, the Balkans, and even as far as Galatia in Asia Minor, in the course of several major migrations.

Germanic homeland

Pre-Germanic cultures were the bearers of the Nordic Bronze Age. Proto-Germanic proper likely developed in the Jastorf culture of the Pre-Roman Iron Age.

Italic homeland

Candidates for the first introduction of Proto-Italic speakers to Italy are the Terramare culture (1500 BC) or the Villanovan culture (1100 BC), although the latter is now usually identified with the non-Italic (indeed, non-Indo-European) Etruscan civilisation. Both are culturally derived from or strongly influenced by the Urnfield culture and its predecessor, the Tumulus culture of Central Europe (1600 BC), so that the latter is a likely candidate for the homeland of an Italo-Celtic proto-language or dialect continuum.

The Romance languages are all derivative of Latin, a member of this Indo-European language subfamily, which was the common language of the Western Roman Empire that had its roots in Italic dialect spoken in and around the capital, Rome, until the empire collapsed in the 5th century CE.

References

• Linguistics and Ideology in the Study of Language by E. F. K. Koerner, University of Ottawa On linguistics and the search for the original Indo-European homeland
• Mallory, J.P. (1989), In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth, London: Thames & Hudson.
• Mallory, James P. (1997), "The homelands of the Indo-Europeans", in Blench, Roger; Spriggs, Matthew (eds.), Archaeology and Language, vol. I: Theoretical and Methodological Orientations, London: Routledge, ISBN 0415117607.

Dravidian homeland

The Dravidian languages have been found mainly in South India since at least the second century BCE (inscriptions, ed. I. Mahadevan 2003). It is, however, a well-established and well-supported hypothesis that Dravidian speakers must have been widespread throughout India, including the northwest region before the arrival of Indo-European speakers.

Historical records suggest that the South Dravidian language group had separated from a Proto-Dravidian language no later than 700 BCE, linguistic evidence suggests that they probably became distinctive around 1,100 BCE, and some scholars using linguistic methods put the deepest divisions in the language group at roughly 3,000 BCE. Russian linguist M.S. Andronov puts the split between Tamil (a written Southern Dravidian language) and Telugu (a written Northern Dravidian language) at 1,500 BCE to 1,000 BCE.

Southworth identifies late Proto-Dravidian with the Southern Neolithic culture in the lower Godavari River basin of South Central India, which first appeared ca. 2,500 BCE, based upon its agricultural vocabulary, while noting that this "would not preclude the possibility that speakers of an earlier stage of Dravidian entered the subcontinent from western or central Asia, as has often been suggested."

Speculations regarding the original homeland being a mythical sunken continent called Kumari Kandam assigned to it by tradition is discredited in academic circles. But, contemporary linguists have assigned its origins to the Indus Valley Civilization, Elam (whose extinct language was spoken in the hills to the East of the ancient Sumerian civilization with whom the Indus Valley Civilization traded and shared domesticated species) in the Elamo-Dravidian language family hypothesis, and West Africa in an Afro-Dravidian hypothesis. The Indus valley script is yet to be conclusively deciphered.

Dr. Asko Parpola (University of Helsinki), Jesuit priest Father Heras in the 1930s and other scholars (such as Indian and early Tamil expert Iravatham Mahadevan and Walter A. Fairservis Jr.) conclude that the Indus sign system represented an ancient Dravidian language, a review supported by Tamil artifacts discovered in 2006.

Harvard Indologist Michael Witzel takes a controversial and recent view that has received serious academic consideration (ca. 2004 CE) which is critical of an Indus Valley Civilization Dravidian homeland and of the widely held view that the inscriptions of the Indus Valley Civilization even constitute a written language. In the essay "Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan" (with RV in this context referring to Rigvedic, i.e. Indo-Aryan), Witzel says "As we can no longer reckon with Dravidian influence on the early RV, this means that the language of the pre-Rigvedic Indus civilization, at least in the Panjab, was of (Para-) Austro-Asiatic nature." There are no examples of Austro-Asiatic languages being spoken further West than East India in the historical era (i.e. in the era for which we have written records).

French anthropologist Bernard Sergent, in La Genèse de l'Inde (1997), argued in 1997 that Dravidian language and culture has its roots in West Africa arriving in coastal West India around 2500 BCE as a culture distinct from and contemporaneous with the Indus Valley Civilization. In this view, Dravidian is an offshoot of the Niger-Congo languages (sometimes called the Niger-Kordofanian) and of the Mande languages sometimes linked with them. In addition to linguistic similarities he points to other cultural connections such as similarities in musical instruments, matrilineal lineages, a shared game, acceptance of cousin marriage, and the use of rounded huts. Upadhyaya and Upadhyaya agree regarding the linguistic connections which they observed as early as 1976,, as does C. Winters, on the basis of linguistic, and crop genetics evidence.

Recent studies of the distribution of alleles on the Y chromosome, microsatellite DNA, and mitochondrial DNA in India have cast some doubt for a biological Dravidian "race" distinct from non-Dravidians in the Indian subcontinent ; other recent genetic studies have found evidence of Aryan, Dravidian and pre-Dravidian strata in South Asian populations. Geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza proposes that a Dravidian people were preceded in India by Austro-Asiatic people, and were present prior to the arrival of Indo-Aryan language speakers in India.

Finno-Ugric (aka Uralic) homeland

The Finno-Ugric homeland cannot be located with certainty. A likely locus is the Comb Ceramic Culture of c. 4200 BC–c. 2000 BC. This is suggested by the high intralinguistic family diversity around the middle Volga River where three highly distinct branches of the Uralic family, Mordvinic, Mari, and Permic are located. Also reconstructed plant and animal names (including spruce, Siberian pine, Siberian Fir, Siberian larch, brittle willow, elm, and hedgehog) are consistent with this localization. This is adjacent to the proposed homeland for Proto-Indo-European under the Kurgan hypothesis.

French anthropologist Bernard Sergent, in La Genèse de l'Inde (1997), argued that Finno-Urgic may have a genetic source or have borrowed significantly from proto-Dravidian or an predecessor language of West African origins. Some linguists see Uralic (Hungarian, Finnish) as having a linguistic relationship to both Altaic (Turkish, Mongol) language groups, and Dravidian languages. The theory that the Dravidian languages display similarities with the Uralic language group, suggesting a prolonged period of contact in the past, is popular amongst Dravidian linguists and has been supported by a number of scholars, including Robert Caldwell, Thomas Burrow, Kamil Zvelebil, and Mikhail Andronov This theory has, however, been rejected by some specialists in Uralic languages, and has in recent times also been criticised by other Dravidian linguists like Bhadriraju Krishnamurti.

Turkic homeland

There is considerable dispute over the time and place of origin of the Turkic languages, but it is undisputed that their origins are not in or near the country named after the language, Turkey, a.k.a. Anatolia.

The Turkic languages are now spoken in Turkey, Central Asia and Siberia. As noted in the wikipedia article on Turkic migration, the Turkish peoples originated in "the Far East including North China, especially Xinjiang Province and Inner Mongolia with parts of Mongolia and Siberia possibly as far west as Lake Baikal and the Altai Mountains. They may have been among the peoples of the multi-ethnic historical Saka known as early as the Greek writer Herodotus. Certainly identified Turkic tribes were known by the 6th century and by the 10th century most of Central Asia, formerly dominated by Iranian peoples, was settled by Turkic tribes. The Seljuk Turks from the 11th century invaded Anatolia, ultimately resulting in permanent Turkic settlement there and the establishment of the nation of Turkey."

The first possibly Turkic peoples to arrive in Europe were the Huns, who were at war with the Roman Empire in the 4th century CE.. Confusingly, the Hungarian language is not a Turkic language (it is a Uralic language related to languages like the Finnish language and Estonian language) and was not spoken by the Huns.

Prior to the Turkic migration, Indo-European languages were spoken in Anatolia and Central Asia as far as the Tarim Basin.

The deeper origins of the Turkic language in connection with other language families, and in time and place, is deeply disputed. The lack of written records prior to the earliest Chinese accounts, and the fact that the early Turkic peoples were nomadic pastoralists, and hence mobile, makes localizing and dating the earliest homeland of the Turkic language difficult.

Language families predominantly found in Africa and Southwest Asia

Khoisan homeland

The Khoisan click languages of Africa are now mostly found in Southern Africa, but genetic evidence from Khoisan language speakers suggest a homeland for the Khoisan people and language "along the African rift and a possible wider East African range."

Afro-Asiatic homeland

Main article: Afro-Asiatic Urheimat

The Afro-Asiatic languages include Arabic, Hebrew, Berber, and a variety of other languages now found mostly in Northeast Africa, although the exact boundaries of this language family are disputed.

The limited area of the Afro-Asiatic Sprachraum (prior to is expansion to new areas in the historic era) has limited the potential areas where the that family's Urheimat could be. Generally speaking, two proposals have been developed: that Afro-Asiatic arose in a Semitic Urheimat in the Middle East aka Southwest Asia, or that Afro-Asiatic languages arose in northeast Africa (generally, either between Darfur and Tibesti or in Ethiopia and the other countries of the Horn of Africa). The African hypothesis is considered to be rather more likely at the present time, because of the greater diversity of languages with more distant relationships to each other there.

Nilo-Saharan homeland

Genetic studies of Nilo-Saharan speaking populations are in general agreement with archaeological evidence and linguistic studies that argue for a Nilo-Saharan homeland in eastern Sudan before 6000 BCE, with subsequent migration events northward to the eastern Sahara, westward to the Chad Basin, and southeastward into Kenya and Tanzania.

Bantu homeland

There is a widespread consensus among linguistic scholars that Bantu dialects of the Niger-Kordofanian language family (aka Niger-Congo language family) have a homeland in Nigeria and Cameroon, prior to a rapid expansion from that homeland starting about 3000 BCE. Linguisic, archeological and genetic evidence also indicates that this expansion included "independent waves of migration of western African and East African Bantu-speakers into southern Africa occurred."

Note that the very specifically known homeland for Bantu is not necessarily or even likely to be the homeland of the Niger-Kordofanian languages of which it is a member.

Language families predominantly found in Southeast Asia, East Asia and Oceania

Sino-Tibetan homeland

According to The Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus project of the University of California at Berkeley (the reference to ST is to the Sino-Tibetan language family):

The Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) homeland seems to have been somewhere on the Himalayan plateau, where the great rivers of East and Southeast Asia (including the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Salween, and Irrawaddy) have their source. The time of hypothetical ST unity, when the Proto-Han (= Proto-Chinese) and Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB) peoples formed a relatively undifferentiated linguistic community, must have been at least as remote as the Proto-Indo-European period, perhaps around 4000 B.C.

Chinese homeland

The origin of the Chinese branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family is associated with the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCE–256 BCE) in Northern China.

In contrast, the other main language families of East Asia and Southeast Asia outside the Sino-Tibetan language family including Austronesian, Austro-Asiatic, Hmong-Mien and Tai-Kadai are generally believed to have at origins at some stage of their development in Southern China.

Tibeto-Burman homeland

The Tibeto-Burman homeland is located in the area encompassing western Sichuan, northern Yunnan and eastern Tibet.

Austro-Asiatic homeland

The homeland of the Austro-Asiatic languages (e.g. Vietnamese, Cambodian) which are found from Southeast Asia to India is hypothesized to be located "the hills of southern Yunnan in China," between 4000 BCE and 2000 BCE, with influences from Aryan and Dravidian languages at the Western edge of its expanse in India, and influence from Chinese at the Eastern edge of the regions were it is found. The distribution of Austro-Asiatic languages suggest that they were once spoken in most of the areas where the Tai-Kadai languages are now dominant.

Austronesian homeland

The homeland of the Austronesian languages is Taiwan. On this island the deepest divisions in Austronesian are found, among the families of the native Formosan languages. According to Blust (1999), the Formosan languages form nine of the ten primary branches of the Austronesian language family. Comrie (2001:28) noted this when he wrote:

... the internal diversity among the... Formosan languages... is greater than that in all the rest of Austronesian put together, so there is a major genetic split within Austronesian between Formosan and the rest... Indeed, the genetic diversity within Formosan is so great that it may well consist of several primary branches of the overall Austronesian family.

Archaeological evidence (e.g., Bellwood 1997) suggests that speakers of pre-Proto-Austronesian spread from the South Chinese mainland to Taiwan at some time around 6000 BCE. Evidence from historical linguistics suggests that it is from this island that seafaring peoples migrated, perhaps in distinct waves separated by millennia, to the entire region encompassed by the Austronesian languages (Diamond 2000). It is believed that this migration began around 4000 BCE (Blust 1999). However, evidence from historical linguistics cannot bridge the gap between those two periods.

The Austro-Tai hypothesis suggests a common origin for the Austronesian languages and the Tai-Kadai languages whose hypothesized place of origin is geographically close to Taiwan.

Hmong-Mien homeland

The most likely homeland of the Hmong-Mien languages (aka Miao-Yao languages) is in Southern China between the Yangtze and Mekong rivers, but speakers of these languages may have migrated from Central China either as part of the Han Chinese expansion or as a result of exile from an original homeland by Han Chinese. Migration of people speaking these languages from South China to Southeast Asia took place ca. 1600-1700 CE.

Tai-Kadai homeland

Many scholars have addressed the question of the origins of the Tai-Kadai languages.

There is a consensus that the Tai-Kadai languages have their origins in Southern China or on major nearby islands (such as Taiwan or Hainan).

The leading hypothesis is that the likely homeland of proto-Tai-Kadai was coastal Fujian or Guangdong as part of the neolithic Longshan culture (of 3000 BCE - 2000 BCE). The spread of the Tai-Kadai peoples may have been aided by agriculture, but any who remained near the coast were eventually absorbed by the Chinese. Weera Ostapirat is one academic who articulates this position.

Laurent Sagart, on the other hand, holds that Tai-Kadai is a branch of Austronesian which migrated back to the mainland from northeastern Formosa (i.e. Taiwan) long after Formosa was settled, but probably before the expansion of Malayo-Polynesian out of Formosa. The language was then largely relexified from what he believes may have been an Austro-Asiatic language. Sagart suggests that Austro-Tai is ultimately related to the Sino-Tibetan languages and has its origin in the Neolithic communities of the coastal regions of prehistoric North China or East China. Ostapirat, by contrast, sees connections with the Austro-Asiatic languages (in Austric), as has Benedict. Reid notes that the two approaches are not incompatible, if Austric is valid and can be connected to Sino-Tibetan.

Robert Blust (1999) suggests that proto-Tai-Kadai speakers originated in the northern Philippines and migrated from there to Hainan (hence the diversity of Tai-Kadai languages on that island), and were radically restructured following contact with Hmong-Mien and Sinitic. However, Ostapirat maintains that Tai-Kadai could not descend from Malayo-Polynesian in the Philippines, and likely not from the languages of eastern Formosa either. His evidence is in the Tai-Kadai sound correspondences, which reflect Austronesian distinctions that were lost in Malayo-Polynesian and even Eastern Formosan.

Genetic evidence coroborates evidence from Kadai speaking people's oral traditions that puts a Kadai homeland on Hainan. Ancient DNA evidence also shows a connection between speakers of Tai-Kadai speaking populations and Austronesian language speaking populations,, and a genetically distinct population at a different location on the Yangtze River as a possible source of Hmong-Mien languages.

Japanese and Korean language homelands

The Korean language is spoken in Korea and among emmigrants from Korea. Japanese language family languages are spoken in Japan and among emmigrants from Japan.

Conservative historical linguists tend to classify the Korean language as a language isolate and a small number of Japanese languages as a language family of their own. Some linguists, such as Turchin, see a connection between Japanese and Korean and an Altaic language family or similar larger grouping of languages, with those speakers coming from an area North of Korea.

Languages spoken predominantly in North and South America

Na-Dene

The Na-Dene languages have been linked linguistically to the Yeniseian languages of the Ket people of central Siberia, suggesting a homeland in Siberia or a back migration of Na-Dene speakers from Beringia. Na-Dene languages are spoken by Native Alaskans and some people from the First Nations of Western Canada, in the Pacific Northwest, and also includes the Southern Athabaskan languages spoken in the American Southwest (e.g. the Apache language and Navajo language). The consensus is that Na-Dene language speaking people migrated from the Pacific Northwest to the American Southwest around 1000 CE.

There is dispute concerning the time at which the Yeniseian languages separated from the Na-Dene languages. One possibility is to assume that the link is contemporaneous with the initial population of the Americas. But, linguistic evidence alone does not rule out a more recent connection.

Implications of current research

The Out of Africa theory of human origins marshals archeological, genetic, and ancient climate evidence to suggest a common origin for all modern humans in Africa about 70,000 years ago and an origin for farming and herding about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. The time and place of the Urheimats of various language family proto-languages spoken by most people alive today is in many cases much more recent.

This can arise from at least two factors: prior languages went extinct as other languages expanded, and some language families may have deeper connections at a greater time depth. For example, the Urheimats in which the proto-languages of the subfamilies are the Indo-European language family necessarily arose more recently than the Proto-Indo-European language family. Similarly, a language superfamily's proto-language must have been spoken in an Urheimat not more recent than the time depth of the oldest language in the language family.

Limitations of the concept of Urheimat

It is only meaningful to describe a language or language family as having an Urheimat when it has a single genetic source in a particular population where a proto-language for that language family was spoken from which there has been divergence of isolated populations speaking the language over time.

This is not always the case. For example, creole languages are hybrids of separate languages that sometimes do not belong to the same language family and have similarities that arise from shared aspects of the creole formation process, rather than from a common origin. For example, a creole language will often lack significant inflectional morphology, lack tone on monosyllabic words, and lack semantically opaque word formatiom, even if these features are found in all of the parent languages.

Other circumstances can also complicate the matter. For example, in places where language families meet, like the interface of the Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic language family in Western Ethiopia, the relationship between a group that speaks a language and the Urheimat for that language is complicated by "processes of migration, language shift and group absorption are documented by linguists and ethnographers" in groups that are themselves "transient and plastic."

Also, over a sufficient period of time, in the absence of evidence of intermediary steps in the process, it may be impossible to observe linkages between languages that have a shared urheimat. This general concern is a manifestation of the larger issue of "time depth" in historical linguistics. For example, while the evidence from genetics, archeology and historical climate change strongly points to a relatively small number of waves in a fairly short time period from Asia to the Americas, there continues to be intense controversy regarding the classification of the indigenous languages of the Americas, for which there is little direct evidence because all but a couple of those languages were not written in the pre-Columbian era, and in Australia and New Guinea, whose history of human migration and contact is also well documented, in which there were thousands of languages none of which were written prior to European contact. Given enough time, natural change in isolated language can obliterate any meaningful linguistic evidence of a known common genetic source for the languages.

See also

• Sprachraum
• Nationalism and ancient history