Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis

by Peter Bellwood (Editor), A. Colin Renfrew (Editor)

Linguistic diversity is one of the most puzzling and challenging features of humankind. Why are there some 6000 different languages spoken in the world? Why are some, like Chinese or English, spoken by millions over vast territories, while others are restricted to just a few thousand speakers in a limited area? The farming/language dispersal hypothesis makes the radical and controversial proposal that the present-day distributions of many of the world's languages and language families can be traced back to early developments in farming and their dispersal from the several nuclear areas where animal and plant domestication emerged.

520 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2002