Language dispersal beyond farming

Why do some languages wither and die, while others prosper and spread? Around the turn of the millennium a number of archaeologists such as Colin Renfrew and Peter Bellwood made the controversial claim that many of the world's major language families owe their dispersal to the adoption of agriculture by their early speakers. In this volume, their proposal is reassessed by linguists, investigating to what extent the economic dependence on plant cultivation really impacted language spread in various parts of the world. Special attention is paid to "tricky" language families such as Eskimo-Aleut, Quechua, Aymara, Bantu, Indo-European, Transeurasian, Turkic, Japano-Koreanic, Hmong-Mien and Trans-New Guinea, that cannot unequivocally be regarded as instances of Farming/Language Dispersal, even if subsistence played a role in their expansion"

Based on papers presented at a symposium entitled "The language of the first farmers", organized by Martine Robbeets at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Naples, September 2-3, 2016

Farming/language dispersal : food for thought / Martine Robbeets -- Proto-Quechua and proto-Aymara agropastoral terms : reconstruction and contact patterns / Nicholas Q. Emlen and Willem F. H. Adelaar -- Subsistence terms in Unangam Tunuu (Aleut) / Anna Berge -- Lexical recycling as a lens onto shared Japano-Koreanic agriculture / Alexander Francis-Ratte -- The language of the Transeurasian farmers / Martine Robbeets -- Farming-related terms in Proto-Turkic and Proto-Altaic / Alexander Savelyev -- Farming and the Trans-New Guinea family : a first consideration / Antoinette Schapper -- The domestications and the domesticators of Asian rice / George van Driem -- Macrofamilies and agricultural lexicon : problems and perspectives / George Starostin -- Were the first Bantu speakers south of the rainforest farmers? A first assessment of the linguistic evidence / Koen Bostoen and Joseph Koni Muluwa -- Expanding the methodology of lexical examination in the investigation of the intersection of early agriculture and language dispersal / Brian D. Joseph -- Agricultural terms in Indo-Iranian / Martin Joachim Kïmmel -- Milk and the Indo-Europeans / Romain Garnier, Laurent Sagart and Benoït Sa…