Natural disasters and language dynamics in Northeast Asia
The Holocene is often considered a period of climatic stability, which has led to a tendency to overlook the role of environmental change in language spread and diversification. However, this era experienced several abrupt climatic disruptions, especially in Northeast Asia, a region highly susceptible to volcanic activity due to its location within the Pacific Ring of Fire. The Transeurasian language family, the unity of Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic languages with a history of around 9 000 years, has been challenged to endure natural disasters, such as gradual millennia-scale climate shifts, abrupt centennial-scale climatic anomalies, and short-term acute events like volcanic eruptions.
In this project, which includes an external collaboration with Peter Jordan and Junzo Uchiyama at Lund University, we explore potential linguistic linkages of the different types of natural disaster. Focussing on Northeast Asia, we investigate how climate change may have impacted the spread of the Transeurasian languages and how the two main volcanic eruptions in Northeast Asia of the last 10 000 years, the Kikai-Akahoya and the Mount Paektu super-eruptions, may have been a barrier to language spread or even have led to language extinction.
In 2023, we organized an interdisciplinary conference “The language of Extreme Events” at our institute in collaboration with Huw S. Groucutt. We are currently finalizing a special issue of Quaternary Environments and Humans “From climate change to language change: how climate impacted language dynamics in the Holocene.”, which will appear in 2026. The issue sheds light on how certain climate trends at a global scale may have led to local linguistic responses, simultaneously in different parts of the world.
The notion of ‘extreme events’ is widely discussed in various disciplines and is a topic of increasing academic research. The aim of our project is to bring together diverse methodologies and perspectives on this topic and develop cross- and multi-disciplinary approaches. Our contention is that there are many analogous discussions in different disciplines, and that talking outside our usual comfort zone is likely to be a productive exercise.
