| Certain diagnostic structural features of languages can be used to estimate an age for human language and to describe major trajectories of early expansion, routes and chronology of the colonization of the Pacific and the New World, and vectors of language spread in interior Eurasia and within the New World. The result is an overview of language types and language origins reaching back at least to the upper Paleolithic, a picture much richer and more specific than the quite meager results produced by distant lexical comparison.
Johanna Nichols is Professor of Slavic Languages at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include the Slavic languages, the linguistic prehistory of northern Eurasia, language typology, ancient linguistic prehistory, and languages of the Caucasus, chiefly Chechen and Ingush. |