Typological bottlenecks: how

large-scale regional language

typologies help us interpret global
prehistory

[DRAFT SUBMITTED FOR REVIEW -NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT REFERENCE TO THE
AUTHOR]

Roger Blench
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
University of Cambridge
Correspondence to:
8, Guest Road
Cambridge CB1 2AL
United Kingdom
Voice/ Ans (00-44)-(0)1223-560687
Mobile worldwide (00-44)-(0)7847-495590
E-mail rogerblench@yahoo.co.uk
http://www.rogerblench.info/RBOP.htm

This printout: Jos, April 7, 2016

Roger Blench Typological bottlenecks Draft submitted for review

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. The expansion of modern humans
3. Negative typology
4. Typological bottlenecks
5. Case studies
5.1 Australia
5.2 Mainland SE Asia
6. Comparisons with other bottlenecks: material culture
7. Conclusion: expanding the remit of typology?
References

1
1
3
3
4
4
4
5
6
7

TABLES
Table 1. Periods when modern humans reached different regions.................................................................... 2
Table 2. Word order characteristics in specific regions of the world................................................................ 3
Table 3. Typological features globally common but absent in Australia.......................................................... 4
Table 4. Language Phyla of SE Asia................................................................................................................. 5
Table 5. Global cultural elements absent in Australia....................................................................................... 6
Table 6. MSEA common cultural elements ...................................................................................................... 6
MAPS
Map 1. The expansion of modern humans ........................................................................................................ 2
ABSTRACT
It is unlikely that local or highly specific typological characteristics of language correlate with other aspects
of human culture and history. However, at regional scale, the broad typology of languages in Australia or the
New World reflect bottlenecks, where the absence of an interchange with languages displaying divergent
characteristics has resulted in remarkable homogeneity. The paper argues that these regions of high
typological similarity are due neither to chance nor long-term convergence, but reflect the initial conditions
of settlement. In other words, if Australian languages are typologically very homogenous, this is because
they are the descendants of the language of the first settlers. This suggests that regions can be characterised
by negative typology, i.e. the absence of globally common traits, and that this results from population
bottlenecks. Conversely, in regions where there has been considerably movement of population, such as
Eurasia, typological diversity will be the norm. Another category of typological uniformity occurs in
mainland SE Asia, a region notable for the similarities between language structures, even in languages of
quite separate phyla. It is suggested that this can be linked to the political and social change in the region
after 4000 BP, when the rapid development of the SE Asian Neolithic transformed a population of scattered
foragers into the highly structured rice-growers of the present. The conclusion is that an expansion of the
remit of typology to uncover large regional patterns can also be tied to the archaeological narrative of the
early expansion of modern humans.
Keywords; Linguistic typology; archaeology; prehistory; material culture

Roger Blench Typological bottlenecks Draft submitted for review

1. Introduction
At first sight it might appear that linguistic typology and the reconstruction of prehistory are radically
opposed. Typologists are concerned with the synchronic comparison of languages, and as far as they are
concerned, the past is a foreign country. Archaeologists sometimes take an interest in the findings of
historical linguistics (see a recent summary in Blench 2014a) especially in respect of the words and things
approach, but the results of typology must seem broadly irrelevant. Indeed, it is unlikely that local or highly
specific typological characteristics of language do correlate with other aspects of human culture and history.
However, typology can operate at different scales; if we change the perspective to encompass large
geographical regions, in some cases typological regularities present a homogeneity susceptible of a historical
interpretation.
It is striking how typologically conservative languages can be when historical factors act to prevent them
from confronting radically different structural models. This best illustrated by a continent such as Australia,
for which there are some two hundred languages documented to some degree (of the estimated two hundred
and fifty spoken at the time of first contact) (McConvell & Thieberger 2001). Australian languages show
remarkable similarities to one another in phonology and case systems (Dixon 2002). It is currently estimated
that Australia was settled some 55,000 years ago (OConnor & Chappell 2003) and once the island of New
Guinea separated around 13,000 years ago it was almost completely isolated from the major flows of human
demographic expansion. Todays linguistic structures are thus in some way descendants of the language of
the first settlers. Indeed it has several times been proposed that a proto-Australian might be reconstructed.
This remarkable conservatism has also been noted in the area of oral tradition, where memories of
geomorphological events have persisted for more than 10,000 years in many parts of the continent (Nunn &
Reid 2015).
This points to a number of interpretative issues relevant to typology and prehistory. The first is the
importance of negative typology, the large areas of the world where phenomena do not occur. Australia,
again, has no reported language with the fricative /s/, a phoneme which is otherwise globally extremely
common (Maddieson 1984). There are no tone languages and no languages with numeral classifiers. This
points to what is called here a typological bottleneck, where the restricted characteristics of the ancestors of
a subset of global languages are reproduced in all daughter languages. Typological bottlenecks strongly
reflect cultures which expand geographically with limited or no contact with structurally divergent
languages. This is most obvious in a region such as Polynesia, where from around 3200 BP, the Polynesians
expanded into essentially empty islands of the Pacific (Wilmshurst et al. 2011). Polynesian languages are
extremely similar to one another and those few which are divergent came into contact with Papuan
languages are part of the colonisation of islands such as Vaeakau-Taumako (Nss & Hovdhaugen 2011).
This points to a large-scale interpretation of typological patterns in terms of the broader movements in
human history
This paper1 is structured as follows; it begins with a brief sketch of the global expansion of modern humans
in terms of the colonisation of individual continents. It then characterises the concepts of negative typology
and typological bottlenecks in more detail. Two case studies are then sketched, that of Australia outlined
above, and SE Asia, a region notable for the similarities between language structures, even in languages of
quite separate phyla. An additional suggestion is made that regional language typologies can also be linked
to material culture profiles; human inventiveness (or lack of it) in terms of language structure is apparently
paralleled in other categories of innovation. The conclusion calls for a revised or expanded approach to
language typology, to include some of the characteristics discussed in the paper.
2. The expansion of modern humans
Any account of the expansion of modern humans is a hostage to fortune; new discoveries keep radically
revising the dates and routes. However, it is generally agreed modern humans originated in Africa some
200,000 years ago (White et al. 2003), and left Africa by two routes, through the Near East and across the

This paper was prepared at the request of the editor of LT, Frans Plank.

Roger Blench Typological bottlenecks Draft submitted for review

Red Sea, around 100,000 years ago. Table 1 is an approximate chronological framework for the expansion
of modern humans out of Africa, using the same regional categories as in successive sections.
Table 1. Periods when modern humans reached different regions
Region
Approximate dates (kya)
References
Sub-Saharan
200
White et al. (2003)
Africa
North Eurasia 45 (Siberia), 80 (China), 100
Pitulko et al. (2016), Xing et al. (2015), Mayer
(Israel), ? 125 (UAE)
et al. (2009), Armitage et al. (2011)
SE Asia
64 (Laos)
Demeter et al. (2015)
Papua
45
OConnell & Allen (2007)
Australia
55
Bowler et al. (2003)
New World
20 [disputed]
Cinq-Mars (1979)
Map 1 represents this dispersal. The most difficult part of the story now appears to be the large
chronological gap between the earliest humans in China and their late arrival in Siberia.
Map 1. The expansion of modern humans

An important element in this narrative is the relative ease of back-migration and waves of subsequent
migration. Africa and Eurasia present essentially no obstacles to movement, and everything we know about
their languages and archaeology suggests a high degree of mobility. Interestingly, eastern Eurasia, the region
approximately corresponding to the former Soviet Union, does show some intriguing homogeneity, for
example in constituent order, which may reflect the difficulties of movement in regions of extreme cold.
Exactly the opposite is true of Australia and Melanesia, where initial settlement seems to been the end of
the line, with no new major demographic movements into the region.
The New World is characterised by numerous language phyla, but the consensus of archaeology is that all its
populations arrived via Siberia. Though the population presumably came in waves, with the ancestors of the
Na-Dene and the Eskimo-Aleut the most recent. New World languages do present some typological
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Roger Blench Typological bottlenecks Draft submitted for review

similarities, suggesting an origin in a zone where the languages were lexically diverse but with many shared
characteristics.
3. Negative typology
The concept of negative typology may seem initially counter-intuitive, but the underlying idea is that some
regions of the world (or possibly ecological zones) show conspicuous lacunae, in other words, certain
globally common phenomena are absent or at low frequencies. This emerges from a large sample of global
languages, such as WALS2 (World Atlas of Language Structures). By searching the maps systematically, it
becomes apparent that certain globally widespread typological features are absent in specific regions. This is
well exemplified by the highly uneven distribution of basic constituent order (Dryer 2011). Word order
characteristics confined to specific regions of the world are shown in Table 2;
Table 2. Word order characteristics in specific regions of the world
Region
Characteristics
Sub-Saharan Africa
complete absence of VOS, OVS and OSV languages
Eastern Eurasia
uniformly SOV
South Asia
uniformly SOV
Mainland Southeast Asia uniformly SVO
It is striking that these characteristics are not necessarily correlated with other typological elements.
Australia, for example, shows many uniform absences (Table 3) but displays a great variety of word orders
(as might be expected in languages with case-marking).
Assuming these areas of geographical homogeneity are not chance, which seems unlikely with such a large
sample, then this calls for an explanation. There are occasionally examples of positive typology, for example
the presence of clicks only in Eastern and Southern Africa, but these are much rarer than absences. The most
striking zone of negative typology is Australia, where many features are absent that are well distributed
elsewhere. These are discussed in greater detail in 5.1.
4. Typological bottlenecks
Typological bottlenecks can be related to negative typologies. If the languages spoken by the populations in
a given area have been squeezed through a constriction, perhaps because of a sea barrier, or a zone where
food or water resources are scarce, they do not necessarily spontaneously develop features common
elsewhere in the world. A rather extreme version of this is the claim by Atkinson (2011) that Phonemic
diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa, in other words, the total
inventory of phonemes decreases as modern humans went ever further out of Africa. Maddieson et al. (2011)
point to some of the methodological problems with this claim, but also highlight the problem that the low
phoneme inventories of languages remoter from the purported source appear not to be correlated with lack
of complexity in other categories of linguistic features. Trudgill (2004) develops a not entirely successful
theory as to why Polynesian languages seem to have a consistently declining phoneme inventory as they
sailed outwards from the source area. More recently there has been a burst of attempts to correlate
phonological features such as vowel inventory and tone with climate (Munroe et al. 2009; Everett et al.
2016). It is remarkably easy to find counter-examples to this type of geographical/typological correlation
despite their publication in respectable journals. The reason for this is that the significance of serial founder
effects may not necessarily be related to rather diffuse concepts such as complexity which can develop or
decline for a variety of reasons. Niger-Congo languages are extremely diverse in many typological areas, but
nonetheless there is an extremely strong correlation between the constituent order SVO and the presence of
noun classes (Williamson & Blench 2000) which argues that individual features can remain conservative
even where others undergo remarkable shifts3.

http://wals.info/
The map in Dryer (WALS) does not indicate the close correlation between the Niger-Congo branches and constituent
order although it shows the marked predominance of SVO.

Roger Blench Typological bottlenecks Draft submitted for review

Typological bottlenecks have to be clearly distinguished from subsequent language levelling episodes. Such
patterns are often described as Sprachbunds, geographical areas characterised by linguistic convergence
(Becker 1948). Sprachbunds have been identified in many regions of the world, with the Balkan Sprachbund
the most well-known. Regions of convergence are typically cited in Africa, notably Ethiopia (Tosco 2000;
see also papers in Heine & Nurse 2008) in India, and the Caucasus. Despite considerable phyletic diversity,
the languages of the Amazon also share many common features (Aikhenvald 2012). However, the subsets of
language which converge are by no means comparable in different regions. In some cases, a high incidence
of lexical borrowing can co-exist with very different grammar and morphology, as in Ethiopia (Bisang 2006).
Papua, especially the Sepik, and Arnhem Land languages, show strong typological similarities in grammar
and morphology in conjunction with high lexical and associated phyletic diversity. Sprachbund may thus be
a less useful term than convergence zone which leaves open the parameters of similarity.
The situation in Australia, Papua and the Amazon might thus either be a manifestation of long term language
levelling or the result of these typological bottlenecks. Mixed explanations remain possible, i.e. where there
is a serial founder effect but language levelling has also occurred. However, this explanation for Australia,
espoused by Dixon (2002) depends on the denial of the existence of Pama-Nyungan, the phylum most
Australianists believe covers the greater part of the continent and whose languages are similar because they
have been diverging for a relatively short period (cf. Evans 2005 for a detailed discussion of Dixons curious
assertions). Pama-Nyungan does have distinctive features, but nonetheless most of its characteristics are
shared with the small independent phyla of the extreme north.
5. Case studies
5.1 Australia
Australia is notable for the phenotypic and genetic uniformity of its populations, its early and rapid
settlement and the absence of significant contact with later population movements after the opening of the
sea-channel with New Guinea (OConnell & Allen 2007). It is also notorious among linguists for the
absence of common typological features generally present in the languages of the world. Table 3, drawn
from the individual chapters and maps of WALS, illustrates some of the typological features globally
common but absent in Australia;
Table 3. Typological features globally common but absent in Australia
Feature
Author
Comment
Nasalised vowels
Hajek
Tone
Maddieson
Glottalised and uvular consonants
Maddieson
Fricatives
Maddieson
Unique globally
Voicing contrast in plosives and Maddieson
Unique globally
fricatives
Numeral classifiers
Gil
Politeness distinction in pronouns
Helmbrecht
Passive constructions
Siewierska
A few exceptions, but shared with New
Guinea
Ordinal numerals
Stolz
& Unique globally
Restricted numerals (i.e. not above 5)

Veselinova
Comrie

Unique globally

5.2 Mainland SE Asia

The ethnolinguistic composition of the SE Asian region is unique in global terms, consisting of five major
phyla and of isolates confined to offshore islands. These phyla are highly coherent, and all appear to be of a
relatively recent origin compared with other continents. Table 4 shows the main language phyla represented
in SE Asia;
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Table 4. Language Phyla of SE Asia
Phylum
Examples
Austroasiatic
Vietnamese, Khmer, Khasi
Austronesian
Chamic, Moken, Malay
Daic=Tai-Kadai=Kra-Dai
Thai, Zhuang
Hmong-Mien=Miao-Yao
Ho Te, Hmong, Pa Hng
Sino-Tibetan/ Tibeto-Burman Chinese, Burmese, Tibetan
The Andamanese languages (Great Andamanese and Onge-Jarawa) is numerically very small, although of
great importance for reconstructing the prehistory of the region. However, due to their long isolation, they
share almost no typological characteristics with other mainland languages.
The other phyla share many common linguistic features, arguing for millennia of intense interaction,
including bilingualism and cultural exchange as well as relexification from dominant or contact languages
(Enfield 2003, 2005; Blench in press, a). There has been considerable investment in the concept of Mainland
Southeast Asia (MSEA) as a linguistic area (Enfield 2003; Enfield & Comrie 2015). Phonology, tones,
morphology (or more precisely the lack of it), word and syntactic structures all show remarkable similarities
despite the evident lexical diversity (Blench 2014b, in press b). Despite this bundle of common features,
these characteristic patterns may not flow from great antiquity. We have good evidence for the rapidity with
which this type of analogical restructuring occurs. Utsat, the Austronesian language spoken in Hainan island,
is a good example of this (Thurgood et al. 2014). Utsat is Chamic, and would have resembled Malay when
its ancestral speakers settled on the mainland of modern-day Vit Nam some 2000 years ago. Constituent
and phonology of Chamic was restructured to more closely resemble the neighbouring Austroasiatic
languages. However, in 969 AD, part of its speakers fled to Hainan island in Southeast China and there came
into contact with both Hlaic and Sinitic languages. Utsat then began to show convergence with these
languages, losing all its morphology and adopting a complex tonal system.
Historical data, notably from Old Chinese, suggests that the characteristic profile of monosyllabic, isolating,
highly tonal languages is a comparatively recent phenomenon (Sagart 1999; Baxter & Sagart 2014: 318).
The western branches of Sino-Tibetan, spoken in Nepal and Bhutan are characterised by a lack of tone and
complex verbal morphology. It is credible that as the Sinosphere languages moved east, including the
ancestors of Sinitic, they were transformed by contact, and developed the profile observed synchronically.
Indeed, the rGyalrongic languages provide an intriguing example of a halfway house, retaining the complex
verbal morphology reminiscent of Nepal, but being tonal (Jacques 2012).
The emerging pattern is thus for a powerful force for convergence, with languages of whatever affiliation
coming within a sphere of influence which causes them to restructure in the direction of a typical model.
Blench (in press b) has pointed to non-linguistic features of the SE Asian area which appear to show the
same pattern. It remains to identify the engine of this pressure for typological convergence. The proposal is
that this is associated with the rapid development of the SE Asian Neolithic some 4000 years ago, which
transformed a population of scattered foragers into the highly structured rice-growers of the present. There
has been considerable discussion about pathways to agriculture in SE Asia, including the proposal that
vegeculture long preceded lowland cereals (see summary in Blench 2013b). It is certainly the case that the
introduction of floodplain rice agriculture around 4000 BP transformed social and ecological relations
throughout the region (Blench 2005; Fuller 2011). It made possible the dense occupation of lightly settled
areas, the control of populations through water management and the generation of surplus which stimulated
trade, interchange and hierarchical polities. It is unclear if these developments can be associated with any
particular language phylum; but we know that these systems spread rapidly across the region, together with a
highly distinctive material culture (Rispoli 2008; Higham & Higham 2009; Higham et al. 2011). It would
not be unreasonable if a transformative subsistence technology was associated with a strong pressure for
linguistic convergence.
6. Comparisons with other bottlenecks: material culture
If linguistic typology can reflect the peopling of a region, then we would also expect it to be correlated with
aspects of culture. Both material culture and genetics are also characterised by bottlenecks and material
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culture shows negative distributions comparable to the negative typology of language. Australia, for
example, is characterised by a striking set of absences, even considering these were forager societies. Table
5 lists some of the cultural elements found elsewhere in the world but apparently absent in Australia;
Table 5. Global cultural elements absent in Australia
Feature
flutes, drums, string instruments
frame houses with internal structuring
bow and arrow, sling
ceramics
Lists like this can be problematic if they are interpreted as having a subtext about primitive or backward
societies. The significance of this list is to underline the fact that linguistic and cultural bottlenecks appear to
co-evolve. It makes no claim about the superiority or otherwise of the bow and arrow over the woomera.
Conversely, mainland Southeast Asia, is characterised by common aspects of social and material culture,
mapped in (Blench in press a). Typical elements are shown in Table 6;
Table 6. MSEA common cultural elements
Feature
Reference
Crossbows
Blench (in press b)
Houses on stilts
Waterson (1990)
Dental evulsion
Tayles (1996), Blench (2013a)
Dual social organisation/oral literature Fox (2006)
Gong ensembles
Collaer (1979), Blench (in press b)
Mouth organ
Schwrer-Kohl (1997)
This is not to claim that these items of material culture or practices map exactly against the SE Asian
typological area. In the case of gongs, for example, we can track their spread through archaeology to a
certain point. The hypothesis is that the gong ensemble matched the evolving social and material models
which were also reflected in language and thus the two gradually came together.
The other possible area where linguistic typology may find external correlates is in human genetics. The
development of hypotheses about human history based on modern and recovered ancient DNA is a fastchanging field, recently revolutionised by the possibility of autosomal or whole-genome analyses.
Manifestly, Australia again demonstrates the importance of the bottleneck underlying its peopling, with
remarkable similarities across the continent (Ingman & Gyllensten 2003; Hudjashov et al. 2007; McEvoy et
al. 2010). All present-day populations seem to refer back to a unitary migration, which corresponds both to
its negative linguistic typology and the pattern of material culture.
7. Conclusion: expanding the remit of typology?
Research in typology is typically non-geographic; comparisons are often global and the concept has a
Chomskyan flavour, that underlying solutions to the modes of linguistic expression arise again and again
due to the fundamental structure of the human brain. The suggestion advanced here is that this is only partly
true; humans are not quite as inventive as this model suggests. The Tasmanians, who lost the art of making
fire some three thousand years ago, were apparently unable to recover this technology and were thenceforth
doomed to carry smouldering tapers from camp to camp (Blench 2008). Plotting presences and absences on
the global linguistic scene may indeed tell stories about early migration.
At the same time, typological diversity within a restricted geographic or phyletic space clearly informs us
about the complex nature of interaction. Africa presents some striking examples of how languages within
tightly-knit subgroups may rapidly change their typological characteristics. The Ogoni (Williamson 1985),
Mambiloid (Blench 1993) and Kadu languages (Blench 2006) have undergone striking structural shifts
within small groups. Ogoni and Mambiloid illustrate a range of forms from extremely isolating with highly
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complex tonal distinctions to low importance of tone and Bantu-like nominal and verbal morphology. The
Kadu languages have undergone a radical shift in constituent order, despite high levels of lexical similarity.
Convergence zones do not happen by accident but reflect demography and society in prehistory. If the
languages of MSEA quickly take on common characteristics, this must be a consequence of culture not some
abstract linguistic process. The Sinitic languages probably present the most striking example of major and
recent restructuring through contact with minority languages, despite their dominant presence in the region
today. Sino-Tibetan languages, almost certainly originally had complex polysynthetic structures without
tone, as the Kiranti languages today. developed into as part of regional convergence. At a larger scale, the
typology of regions such as Australia or the New World seem to reflect bottlenecks, an absence of flow of
divergent characteristics of language leading to remarkable homogeneity. These regions of high typological
similarity are due neither to chance nor long-term convergence, but reflect the initial conditions of
settlement. It seems probable that there is a correlation both with material culture and genetics although this
must reflect a future research agenda.
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