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<NYT_KICKER></NYT_KICKER><NYT_HEADLINE version="1.0" type=" "><h2>World's Farmers Sowed Languages as Well as Seeds</h2></NYT_HEADLINE><NYT_BYLINE version="1.0" type=" "><font size="-1"><strong>By NICHOLAS WADE</strong></font><br><br></NYT_BYLINE>
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<P> <IMG SRC="http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/t.gif" BORDER="0" ALIGN="left" ALT="T">he homelands of the Indo-European languages stretch from Dublin to Delhi. But Hadza, a tongue that is one of a kind, is spoken by just 1,000 people near Lake Eyasi in Tanzania. Why do the world's languages have so uneven a distribution pattern?</p><P> Two researchers theorize that much of the answer has to do with events that began 10,000 years ago, as crop plants were domesticated in different regions.</p><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" align="right"> <tr><td width="5" rowspan="2"><img src="http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif" width="5" height="1" border="0"/></td> <td><div align="center"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, Sans Serif" color="#999999" size="-2">Advertisement</font><br><!-- ADXINFO classification="bigad" campaign="nytstoreSG1-nyt"--><A HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&page=www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/science&pos=MiddleRight&camp=nytstoreSG1-nyt&ad=gift_big_ad&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Enytimes%2Ecom%2Fnytstore%2Findex%2Ehtml" target="_blank"><IMG SRC="http://graphics7.nytimes.com/adx/images/nytstoreSG1-nyt/StoreBanner336x280_v2._anim.gif" BORDER=0 ></A></div></td></tr><tr><td><img src="http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif" width="1" height="10" border="0"/></td></tr> </table><P> The invention of agriculture has long been invoked to explain the spread of the Indo-European languages. Now, Dr. Jared Diamond of the University of California at Los Angeles and Dr. Peter Bellwood of the Australian National University in Canberra have applied the concept to 15 major language families. Their article appeared in the April 25 issue of Science.</p><P> The premise is that when humans lived as hunters and gatherers, their populations were small, because wild game and berries can support only so many people. But after an agriculture system was devised, populations expanded, displacing the hunter-gatherers around them and taking their language with them.</p><P> On this theory, whatever language happened to be spoken in a region where a crop plant was domesticated expanded along with the farmers who spoke it.</p><P> Even if the farmers interbred with the hunter-gatherers whose land they took over, genes can mix, but languages cannot. So the hunter-gatherers would in many cases have adopted the farmers' language. That is why languages "record these processes of demographic expansion more clearly than the genes," Dr. Bellwood said.</p><P> One of the clearest expansions, perhaps because it occurred most recently, can be found in the 1,436 languages in the Niger-Congo or Bantu family, the world's largest. About 5,000 years ago, Bantu speakers in western Africa who cultivated the yam started spreading out from their homeland. One group traveled south, the other first east to the Great Lakes and then south. The two migrations spread the Bantu languages through a third of the continent, displacing the Khoisan, or click-language speakers, who were hunter-gatherers.</p><P> The agricultural regions of China made up the homelands of three major families, Dr. Diamond and Dr. Bellwood wrote. One was Austro-Asiatic, which includes a swath of languages now spoken in Cambodia, southern China, India, Malaya and Thailand. Another was the Tai group, which includes Lao and Thai. A third was the Sino-Tibetan family.</p><P> In the New World, the farmers who domesticated maize and beans in Mexico expanded northward to the area that became the southwestern United States, spreading the Uto-Aztecan family of languages. </p><P> Austronesian, a group of 1,236 languages, is the second largest, after the Niger-Congo. The founder language was spoken by rice growers in southern China who colonized Taiwan before 3000 B.C. and spread through Polynesia, reaching New Zealand by A.D. 1200.</p><P> The Science article endorses a bold suggestion for the origin of Japanese. The writers say it is derived from the language of rice farmers who arrived from Korea around 400 B.C. and spread their agriculture northward from a southern island, Kyushu. Modern Japanese is not at all like Korean. But Korea had three ancient kingdoms, each with its own language. Modern Korean derived from the ancient Sillan. Japanese may have evolved from another ancient Korean language, Koguryo, the article says.</p><P> Just as China was a powerhouse of new language families in the East, the Fertile Crescent, the arc running through Lebanon and through Iraq, was the source of at least three major language families in the West, the authors say.</p><P> One was Dravidian, a language family now centered on southern India. A second was the Indo-European family, which includes English, French and German in its Western branch and Iranian and Hindi in its Eastern branches. A third may have been Afro-Asiatic, a family that includes ancient Egyptian and Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew.</p><P> The best-known movements of people are those of conquering armies like the Mongols, who overran much of Eurasia. But soldiers are often too few in number to impress their language on a population. The Mongols, because of their rulers' harems, left behind many more genes than conquering armies usually do, but their language vanished from their conquered territories. </p><P> "These early language spreads were essentially driven by demographic processes, or colonization, to use another word," Dr. Bellwood said.</p>
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<div align="right"><font size="-1"><b>Continued</b><br>1 | <a href="/2003/05/06/science/06LANG.html?pagewanted=2">2</a> | <a href="/2003/05/06/science/06LANG.html?pagewanted=2">Next>></a></div>
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