The Two Branches of Western Numic Are the Mono and Northern Paiute Languages
DESCENT AND DIFFUSION IN LANGUAGE DIVERSIFICATION: A STUDY OF WESTERN NUMIC DIALECTOLOGY 1 MOLLY BABEL, ANDREW GARRETT, MICHAEL J. HOUSER, AND MAZIAR TOOSARVANDANI The two branches of Western Numic are the Mono and Northern Paiute languages. We argue that this taxonomic structure did not arise as usually assumed in historical linguistics, through increased differentiation brought about by changes internal to each branch, but rather that diffusion between Western and Central Numic played a crucial role in forming the Western Numic family tree. More generally, we suggest that diffusion plays a greater role in language diversification than is usually recognized. [KEYWORDS: dialectology, diffusion, Numic, phylogeny, subgrouping] 1. Introduction. The emergence of language boundaries in a dialect network raises a venerable question in historical linguistics. How do discrete language differences arise in populations in which speech variation is rela- tively continuous along social or geographic dimensions? Over longer time spans, such discrete boundaries yield the sharply differentiated branches of a language family. What, then, is the origin of the family-tree effect in language relationships? 1 An early version of this paper was presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA). For comments, discussion, and suggestions at various stages of our work we are grateful to the SSILA audience, to Claire Bowern, Victor Golla, Chris Loether, Mark Hale, Jane Hill, John McLaughlin, Sally Thomason, Tim Thornes, and three IJAL reviewers, and to our fellow participants in the 2005–2006 field methods course at the University of California, Berkeley: Erin Haynes, Reiko Kataoka, Fanny Liu, Nicole Marcus, Ruth Rouvier, Ange Strom-Weber, and Corey Yoquelet.
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