ELL: Fwd: Tribes, population

[Paul Lewis]

An article you might find useful is:

Grimes, Joseph E. 1986. Area norms of language size. In Benjamin F.
Elson (ed.), Language in Global Perspective: Papers in Honor of the
50th Anniversary of the Summer Institute of Linguistics 1935-1985.
pp.5 -20. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Grimes does a fairly extensive statistical analysis of the size of
language groups by  regions of the world.

M. Paul Lewis



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>Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 17:40:42 +0900
>To: aboriginal-studies-L at coombs.anu.edu.au,
>endangered-languages-l at carmen.mudoch.edu.au
>From: Tasaku Tsunoda <tsunoda at tooyoo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp>
>Subject: Tribes, population
>Cc:
>Bcc:
>X-Attachments:
>
>25 April 2001
>
>Dear Colleagues,
>    I would very much appreciate your information on the following
points.
>
>1. Population of the tribes in Aboriginal Australia
>On pp. 35 and 451 of their book $B%d(BThe Word of the first
Australians$B%f
(B (1968,
>First paperback impression), Robert and Catherine Berndt state that
the >average number of the population of the tribes was about 500.
>    I realize that the concept of tribe is not free from problems and
 has
>been criticized. Nonetheless, I would like to know a very rough
estimate >of the average size of the population of the tribes in
pre-contact days.
>    My question:
>    (1) Is there any more recent estimate ? If there is one, I would
like
>to cite it.
>
>2. Populations of aboriginal groups elsewhere in the world
>I have an impression that the (estimated) average size of 500 for
>Australian tribes is far smaller than that in other parts of the
world.
>    Example 1: On p.191 of the following paper:
>
>Matisoff, James A. 1991. Endangered languages of mainland Southeast
Asia. >In Robert H. Robins and Eugenius M. Uhlenbeck (eds.) Endangered
languages,
>189-228. Oxford and New York: Berg.
>
>Matisoff talks about Temiar, which has 11,593 speakers, and Semai,
which >has 18,327 speakers, and he refers to them as $B%d(Btiny
languages$B%f(B.
>    Example 3: One of our students works on an Aboriginal language of
>Taiwan (Bunun), which has about 30,000 speakers. He considers this
>language a minority language.
>    My questions:
>    (2) What is the (estimated) average of the population of a tribe
or a
>linguistic group in pre-contact days elsewhere in the world ?
>    (3) Would it be correct to say that the above-cited (estimate)
average
>for Aboriginal Australia is much smaller than that for other parts of
the >world ?
>
>    Again, I would very much appreciate your information.
>
>Best wishes,
>
>Tasaku Tsunoda

--

Tasaku Tsunoda
Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology
University of Tokyo
Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-0033, Japan

Phone:  +81-3-5841-3790
Fax:     +81-3-5803-2784
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