Three facets to the history of languages

1. genetic linguistics - drift through time from a common source

2. language contact - how languages mix

3. The "Big Picture" not answered by 1 or 2

Why do some languages have millions of speakers, others only a few?

Why do some families contain many members, others only one (isolate)?

Why do some languages die out while others thrive and spread?

The answers must be language-external, since in evolutionary terms there are no inferior or superior languages.

3. Ecological linguistics - how geography, climate, plant and animal domestication, food economy and disease patterns influence language spread, extinction and mixing

First Peopling of the Continents - geography determines original language family spread

Paleolithic (10,000 years ago) - all people in small groups of hunter-gatherers, no widespread or large languages.

Neolithic revolution (began by 8,000BC) people begin to rely on farming, settled life.

Plant and animal domestication occurs only in some places  

Benefit:  Food producers increase ten-fold, spread out

Price:  Sedentary living produces new epidemic diseases:  Measles, TB, Smallpox, Chicken Pox, Influenza, etc.

Disease in history - kills more people than wars or famine

Old world - produced most new epidemic diseases

New world (Americas, Australia, Pacific) does not

Europeans bring germs to outlying areas after 1492, cause aboriginal peoples and languages to die off, be replaced

Endemic diseases kill Europeans in tropical Asia and Africa.

Malaria, Yellow fever transplanted to tropical Americas

Pidginized creoles created in tropics by colonialism + disease.

Three effects of disease on world language distribution:

1. Spread of epidemic disease by relatively immune Europeans causes Americas, Australia lose much of their diversity

2. Endemic disease protects language diversity in tropical areas of the Old World

3. A few hundred new creole languages develop in the tropics on the basis of European languages