Age of various language families

[Mikael Parkvall]

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The other day, I asked Histlingers about the suggested ages of various 
language families. I have received two comments on my question (one in 
private, and one on the list), which suggest that I should perhaps give a 
little bit of background on the reason for asking this.

I appear to have given both respondents the impression that I am quite a 
bit more naïve than I actually am -- I am a professional linguist, and 
perfectly aware of the caveats involves. Also, the reason for asking is not 
that I have come up with what I myself consider the most brilliant idea of 
all times, to which I intend to devote ten years of research.

Rather, my curiosity was sparked by my writing a review of a recent Bob 
Dixon & Sasha Aikhenvald book (which some of you have probably read). A 
couple of years ago, I read Dixon's "The rise and fall of langauges", where 
he develops his "punctuated equilibrium" idea. I presume you are familiar 
with it. the main idea is that the Indo-European/Austronesian-type spread, 
which yields neat family trees is the exception rather than the rule, so 
that the Stammbaum model could and should not be extended to cases like 
Australian and Khoisan languages. At the time, I wasn't overly impressed by 
his reasoning, but I was surprised to realise that I now, when reading the 
new book, was more positive. Maybe I was just more receptive.

Anyway, there are two points that I found especially intriguing. The first 
is that isoglosses in Australia display no bundling whatsoever (or so Dixon 
claims -- much of what I know about Australian languages comes from him, 
and I know he's controversial to say the least among Australianists). And 
in a well-behaved, nicely branching family, we would of course expect 
subgroups, and hence isogloss bundling. If his claim is true, this is most 
interesting. I recently tried to discuss it with a well-known Australianist 
who made me disappointed by simply saying that "we just _know_ that 
Pama-Nyungan is a family, and that Dixon is wrong", without being able to 
deliver a single argument. (If there are Australianists on the list, I'd 
love to hear the relevant arguments).

The other point I found interesting is the one which provoked my recent 
question on the list. It goes something like this: Indo-European is 
generally believed to be X years old, and has split up into Y different 
languages. Mankind has been speaking for 20 (or whatever) times as long as 
Indo-European has existed. Therefore, if the splitting rate IE is 
representative, there ought to be (even if we take language death into 
account) umpteen gazillion languages spoken on earth today. Clearly, this 
isn't the case. So there.

So, what I really wanted to do was to check this claim -- to what extent do 
or don't other well-established language families behave like IE in terms 
of splitting rate? Of course we won't get a clear answer to this, but I 
suppose we could get a very general and approximate idea.


Mikael Parkvall