The Ecology-Language Relationship Through Time in Microcosms of the World’s Ecologies: the Andes and the Altai-Amur-Japan

How, why and to what extent might ecology have shaped the histories of human languages, and how they have spread across our planet’s diverse environments? Regions of the earth that may prove especially informative are those that span a wide range of its diverse ecologies, in microcosm.

This symposium targets two such regions, one in the Tropics, the other in temperate latitudes. From the teeming waters of the Pacific, fringed by a narrow coastal desert, the central Andes rise rapidly to the snowline and then fall away to the Amazonian rainforest. From the Altai to Japan, ecology similarly ranges from alpine tundra through desert to pastoral landscapes, rich river and maritime resources, and farmlands. In each region, we consider the following core themes:

• How direct is any potential causation by which ecology and environmental context might shape language distributions?  Is any causation essentially indirect, mediated by subsistence or by other factors that can shape language distributions?  Those other factors may themselves in turn either be shaped by ecology — or override it. 
• How far has the strength and directness of any causation changed over time, as the overall human-ecology relationship has itself shifted through the Anthropocene, as human cultures and societies, first heavily shaped by their environmental contexts, ultimately came to actively reshape those contexts by their own agency? 
• How far and in which contexts does the ecology-language relationship operate through either demographic or socio-cultural mechanisms, leading language lineages either to match or mismatch with human genetic lineages?
• How does ecology impact language structure? Although it is the vocabulary of a language that is most clearly influenced by ecology, to what extent may other levels of language structure, such as phonology and morphology be affected? How is the sound structure of the languages under discussion shaped by the climate in the area in which they are spoken? Can we reconstruct specific morphological markers that encode information about past climate and ecology in both regions? Do differences in morphological complexity among the languages concerned reflect ecological variation or different levels of access to natural resources?

This symposium will bring together experts in the language histories of both regions, and in their (pre)history, archaeology, (palaeo)climatology, and human genetics. To this end, we will apply a “tandem approach”, meaning that each presenting teams combines linguistic expertise with input from a specialist beyond linguistics, such as a palaeoclimatologist, archaeologist, or a geneticist. The resulting presentation is expected to be a joint presentation on a common research question.