Questioning of the elite dominance theory

[Larry Trask]

Tristan Jones writes:

> I do not think elite dominance is enough for a conquered people to adopt the
> invaders language, sure they will adopt some words from the invading language
> and change the conquered peoples language, depends if the invaders or the
> invaded are more advanced than another. In those cases where a small elite
> domaites over a conquerored nation (i.e. the Franks in Gaul, Germanic Tribes
> in Italy and Spain, Mongols and Tartars in Russia) these invading cultures
> where just absorbed into the local culture.  People only adopt the language
> of invader as a primary tongue because lots of peoples of the invaders
> actually come to their homeland and make a statement like this <B>"adopt out
> language, we are here to stay!, if you do not like it go somewhere else"</B>.
> In the moments where invader languages replaced the languages of the
> conquered, Slavic over the various languages of Eastern Europe, Indo-European
> over the pre Indo european languages of Europe in the 4th to 3rd Millennium
> BC, Anglo-Saxons over the Welsh, Turks over the Greeks in Anatolia and the
> Indo-Aryans over the Dravidian speaking people's of Northern India. We have
> seen huge migrations of the invaders come to the lands they conquered, not
> just replacing the elite of the society, however huge sections of it. The
> main question is how much of invaded population would the Invaders have to
> make up to impose their language onto the invaded people's

I don't think it's possible to generalize like this.  Take the Turks.

The Turkish conquest of Anatolia resulted in the almost total
replacement of the earlier languages in favor of Turkish.  But we
cannot conclude that this came about because vast numbers of
Turkic-speakers poured into the area and overwhelmed the indigines.

The Turks of Turkey look very little like the Turkic-speakers of
central Asia, but very much like their Greek, Armenian, Kurdish
and Lebanese neighbors.  Cavalli-Sforza, in his big genetic atlas,
reports that there is "very little difference" between the Turks
and their neighbors, with the Turks being genetically closest to
the speakers of Persian, Kurdish, Lebanese Arabic and Aramaic
('Assyrian').  He concludes that the number of Turkish-speaking
invaders was "probably rather small", and that these invaders were
apparently absorbed into the indigenous population (The History and
Geography of Human Genes, 1994, pp. 242-243).  He further notes that
the Turks seem to be more than averagely genetically heterogeneous,
and that further study is called for to investigate this heterogeneity.

The speakers of Arabic appear to be another case in point.  C-S's
organization by continents makes these a little awkward to investigate,
but it appears that Arabic-speakers are genetically a very diverse
group, with each local group related more strongly to speakers of
neighboring languages -- Turkish, Persian, Kurdish, Aramaic, Berber,
Cushitic, Ethiopian Semitic -- than to speakers of Arabic elsewhere.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)