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Item type:Publication, Language, ecology and climate change: First principles and worldwide perspectives(Elsevier BV, 2026-03-01)The acceleration of climate change over recent decades threatens consequences so wide-ranging that they extend across the human sciences, and call for perspectives from all disciplines. Notwithstanding various attempts to integrate the humanities into climate research, linguistics has been slow to engage with the topic. This special issue aspires to remedy this, by setting out basic principles for exploring how language dynamics have related to ecology, and in particular to climate change , over the last 10,000 years, drawing examples from various language families worldwide. We investigate how language distributions can pattern by ecology, how climate change can thus drive language mobility, and look into cases where languages have even been argued to show certain characteristics associated with the ecologies in which they are (or were) spoken. We summarize quantitative, qualitative and multi-disciplinary methodology that can help us explore this ecology-language interface, and introduce various overarching models that have been proposed for ecology-language relationships at the global scale. What emerges from these analyses and worldwide case-studies is that relationships between climate/ecology and language are essentially indirect, but nonetheless far-reaching, mediated as they are through crucial aspects of human culture and social structures, not least subsistence modes. And through time, over the human trajectory from Holocene into the emerging Anthropocene, the relationship largely inverts, shifting from environmental determinism upon humans and their languages towards increasing anthropogenic impacts on ecology and language dynamics.1 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Language Lessons on the Prehistory of South America(Oxford University Press, 2026-05-21)Linguistics holds rich potential to inform our understanding of South American prehistory. We set out the various dimensions of the linguistic panorama: patterns in language diversity, the expansions and divergence of great language families, and contact and convergence between languages of independent origins. We survey the methodological toolkit by which language comparisons on each level can shed light on their speakers' pasts. We assess also how best to link up this linguistic record with archaeology and genetics, through correlations in the where, when, and why of prehistory. We look at geographical distributions and seek the homelands out of which each major language family began its expansion. We look at chronology and the different time-depths of those families. And we look at what causation might best explain how each great family came to exist at all, and spread so spectacularly, while other regions harbor acute language diversity. We assess big-picture patterns and contrasts between the Andean highlands and the eastern lowlands, particularly Amazonia. Amid a host of smaller families and unique language isolates, we briefly survey the origins and prehistories of the main individual language families within each macroregion: Quechua, Aymara, Chibchan, and Mapudungun; Arawak, Tupí, Carib, and Jê. Separately, we consider the various forms, intensities, and outcomes of contact and convergence among the speakers of these languages over time. Throughout, we assess what all this means for prehistory: how to read these linguistic signals in concert with archaeology and genetics for a more holistic prehistory of Indigenous South America.1