cover image: The social lives of isolates (and small language families): the case of the Northwest Amazon

20.500.12592/2v9tcvq

The social lives of isolates (and small language families): the case of the Northwest Amazon

28 Dec 2022

The Americas are home to patches of extraordinary linguistic (genealogical) diversity. These high-diversity areas are particularly unexpected given the recent population of the Americas. In this paper, we zoom in on one such area, the Northwest Amazon, and address the question of how the diversity in this area has persisted to the present. We contrast two hypotheses that claim opposite mechanisms for the maintenance of diversity: the isolation hypothesis suggests that isolation facilitates the preservation of diversity, while the integration hypothesis proposes that conscious identity preservation in combination with contact drives diversity maintenance. We test predictions for both hypotheses across four disciplines: biogeography, cultural anthropology, population genetics and linguistics. Our results show signs of both isolation and integration, but they mainly suggest considerable diversity in how groups of speakers have interacted with their surroundings.

Authors

Rik van Gijn, Sietze Norder, Leonardo Arias, Nicholas Q Emlen, Matheus C B C Azevedo, Allison Caine, Saskia Dunn, Austin Howard, Nora Julmi, Olga Krasnoukhova, Mark Stoneking, Jurriaan Wiegertjes

Bibliographic Reference
Rik van Gijn, Sietze Norder, Leonardo Arias, Nicholas Q Emlen, Matheus C B C Azevedo, et al.. The social lives of isolates (and small language families): the case of the Northwest Amazon. Interface Focus, 2022, 13, ⟨10.1098/rsfs.2022.0054⟩. ⟨hal-03952231⟩
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0054
HAL Collection
['CNRS - Centre national de la recherche scientifique', 'INRIA - Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique', 'Université Claude Bernard - Lyon I', 'Fédération de Recherche BioEnviS, BioEnvironnement et Santé (Université de Lyon)', 'Inria autres', 'Laboratoire de biométrie et biologie évolutive', 'UDL', 'Université de Lyon', 'TEST3-HALCNRS', 'collection test', 'collection test 5', 'Institut écologie et environnement du CNRS']
HAL Identifier
3952231
Institution
['Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1', 'Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique', "VetAgro Sup - Institut national d'enseignement supérieur et de recherche en alimentation, santé animale, sciences agronomiques et de l'environnement"]
Laboratory
Laboratoire de Biométrie et Biologie Evolutive - UMR 5558
Published in
France

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