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FORERUNNERS TO GLOBALIZATION: THE EURASIAN STEPPE AND ITS PERIPHERY

JOHANNA NICHOLS

Summary The Turco-Mongol steppe empires brought Europe and Asia together as never before, and the Mongol Empire was the first phase of globalization as we now know it. Inner Eurasia is a closed spread zone surrounded by ecological barriers to the entry of new languages to the spread zone. These barriers, plus the structural consequences of language shift, entail globalization effects: the durable uniformity and low structural complexity of the Eurasian linguistic type. A different situation obtained at the edges of the spread zone, accounting for the sociolinguistics of the early Turkic-Mongolian interaction at the eastern steppe intake, the fact that Turkic (rather than Mongol) speech spread with the Mongol army, and the survival of Hungarian despite its subor- dinate position as an ethnic enclave in a Turkic confederation.

1. Introduction The Turco-Mongol steppe empires brought Europe and Asia together as never before, and the Mongol Empire in particular took the first major steps toward globalization as we now know it. The fates of several languages on and near the steppe in Turco-Mongol times are used here to uncover general principles of macrosociolinguistics and language history at the peripheries of spread zones – that is, to propose pieces of a general model for language sur- vival and non-survival at the edges of spread zones. The spreading languages of the steppe prove to be systematically less complex than the enclaves at the periphery, and over time the families undergoing spreads have come to re- semble each other more and more in structural typology, culminating in the Eurasian or Altaic linguistic type and a high degree of structural consistency. The question to be entertained here is whether and to what extent de- complexification, structural consistency, and approximation to the Eurasian type are the result of pure contact and hence a globalization effect; and if so, why such changes are not a common consequence of contact in all areas. The steppe cultures of interest here are the mounted pastoral nomads, es- pecially those of the eastern and Mongolian steppes. Mounted nomadism here goes back some 3000-4000 years. As of about 2000 BCE ancestral Indo- Iranian had extended across the eastern steppe and begun its spread to the western steppe, Central Asia, and ultimately India and Iran, and likely Tocharian speakers were established in today's Xinjiang. Stockbreeding and pastoral nomadism spread from these Indo-European groups to the indige- 178 JOHANNA NICHOLS nous peoples of eastern Central Asia and Mongolia, to flourish among the Turkic and Mongolic speakers of the Mongolian steppe. The Turco-Mongol period on the steppe began in the late second to early third centuries CE, when Hunnish expansion began and with it intensive linguistic contacts be- tween Bulgar Turkic and ancestral Mongolic (Janhunen 1996:188-9). Steppe people began to shift from Iranian to Turkic speech at that time. Turkic- Mongolic contact episodes continued through the 13th century, when Genghis Khan consolidated Mongol power and greatly expanded the ranges of both Turkic and Mongolic, through the 14th century when the Mongol empire dis- integrated, and for some time after the Russian conquest of the steppe began with Ivan the Terrible's defeat of the Astrakhan Khanate in 1556. The ques- tions at issue here are why we now have Turkic, rather than Mongolic, lan- guages spoken over most of the former Mongol Empire, and what were the sociolinguistic positions of Turkic and Mongolic in the expanding Mongol empire. A related question is which steppe and near-steppe groups did not shift to the spreading language but preserved their own languages, and how and why.

2. Closed and open spread zones The notion of spread zone is defined in Nichols 1992:12-24: an area where, due to the right combination of ecological and economic factors, from time to time a language spreads across the entire area, causing extinction of its pre- cedessors as the latter's speakers shift to the new language. The process later repeats, with a neighbor or sometimes a daughter of the first language sweep- ing over the same area and driving the previous one to extinction. Each spreading language diversifies into daughter languages and/or branches, but the next spread erases most of that diversity and prunes the family tree drasti- cally, in the process removing the early neighbors and close sisters of the new spreading language. (For example, the spread of Indo-European consumed whatever neighbors and close sisters it had, thereby removing information about its origin and prehistory.) At any time in a spread zone there is low ge- nealogical diversity, though over time a good number of languages have been spoken there. Each spreading language has economic and cultural prestige and therefore has contact effects on its neighbors. Remnants of previous spreading languages may persist in enclaves at the periphery of the spread zone, and occasionally one of them may become the next spreading language. Such enclave languages also sometimes spread beyond the periphery into en- tirely different ecologies and culture areas. The next spreading language can be drawn from the population of lan- guages at the periphery of the spread zone, and in an open spread zone – one without ecological barriers to entry – this guarantees a certain amount of structural and genealogical diversity in the spread zone over time. Things are different in a closed spread zone, one which is isolated by ecological barriers.