Language migration

Language migration may refer to various types of language change, including change associated with human migration and language contact. Language migrations can exert phonetic and sometimes grammatical changes onto a given language, sometimes diverging into separate language families (such as Proto-Germanic and Proto-Slavic, both of which were daughter families of the Proto-Indo-European language family). For this reason, language migrations are often used as tools for describing historical language families and differences in morphosyntax for dialect continuums in situ, especially the Arabic dialects and the Chinese language family.

Examples

Europe

Almost all languages native to modern-day Europe are Indo-European in origin, with the exceptions of Basque, the Northeast and Northwest Caucasian languages and the Uralic languages. The residents of Neolithic Europe prior to the migration of the Yamnaya or Indo-Europeans, referred to as Old Europeans, spoke several ancient languages and families, such as the Vasconic languages, Etruscan and Pre-Greek, among others. However, as a result of their extinction, most of the linguistic diversity in Europe is endogenous to Indo-European, and exists solely as a consequence of its further subdivision. The extant subdivisions are as follows, ordered chronologically and provided according to the current understandings of the steppe theory:^[1]

• Hellenic
• Italic
• Celtic
• Armenian
• Germanic
• Balto-Slavic
• Albanian

See also

• Dialect continuum

References

2. Wolfram, Walt & Natalie Schilling-Estes, 2003. "Dialectology and Linguistic Diffusion."

The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, pp. 713–735, ^[1]

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