The Taíno are (not) extinct

I am usually a silent fan of Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog; but a (now not so) recent post spurred me to blogging…*

The cause of the post was a retraction by Nature of a statement that the Taino are now ‘extinct’. Here’s the retraction:

This article originally stated that the Taíno were extinct, which is incorrect. Nature apologizes for the offence caused, and has corrected the text to better explain the research project described.

And here’s the corrected article, whose initial paragraph states

…Today, the genomes of most if not all descendents of Taínos now contain few of the unique markers that characterized their ancestors.

That seems to me to be both more factually correct, and to reflect the difference between genetic labels and cultural ones that goes to the heart of this post.

Pontikos finds that offensive, and calls it “timorous” that science will “acquiesce… to sensitivity in matters ethnic”. The rest of the post gives examples of labels which refer to groups, species, etc which are now uncontroversially ”extinct”.

Scientific discourse is full of discourse that is alienating and offensive to indigenous peoples. One that comes to mind immediately is how biological anthropology tends to talk about ‘mating’ or ‘reproduction’ rather than ‘marriage’ in indigenous groups. Jack Ives (U Calgary) has shown that not considering the social dimension of marriage rules and choices has consequences for how those rules play out at a population level. That is, ignoring “marriage” in favour of “mating” leads to bad science, as well as being offensive.

One of the many good things about the internet is that it is making science publishing more accessible to the “subjects” of that research. Some scientists seem to be having a little trouble adjusting to this. Much is predicated on he assumption that ethnographic (and linguistic fieldwork) writing will most probably not be read by the subjects of that work. There are many barriers (both obvious ones and not so obvious ones) – language barriers, educational ones, access ones – even for people brought up as insiders to the system – think of the number of articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the difficulties of getting tenure-track jobs. Increase in access to science is only going to pay off in better research down the track, and if that means not phrasing the results in a way that is offensive to research participants, and that helps us keep in mind that without those research participants, we would know an awful lot less about the diversity of our world, the choice seems obvious.

 

*Caveat: I haven’t read the 95 comments+ on this post.

How many languages were spoken in Australia?

For years, I’ve been using the figure of approximately 250 Aboriginal languages spoken at the time of European settlement, of which roughly 150 were Pama-Nyungan. I recently had the chance to clean up my list of standard language names, which means that I finally got a fairly accurate estimate of how many languages there actually were. This includes some “languages” that we would probably treat as mutually intelligible varieties if we were being very strict, but on the “Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are separate languages” model, I am comfortable treating languages like Dhuwal and Dhuwala as distinct. Some of the decisions are a bit arbitrary, though.

Here are the figures:

• 363 languages in Australia, 364 if we include Meryam Mir, which is a Papuan language spoken in Australian territory. The number goes up by 7 if we include Tasmanian languages, but my database only includes the mainland.
• 275 of those languages are Pama-Nyungan.
• I am working with 30 primary subgroups and 5 isolates, within Pama-Nyungan.

The full list is here: AustLangs-MasterLanguageList-Dec2011 You are free to use it for your own (non-commercial) purposes, and I would be very happy to hear about corrections, additions, subtractions, etc. If you want a list of languages, this is, if I say so myself, a far better list to use than the Ethnologue’s.

Letter to Science: Forster and Renfrew

Keith Hunley (University of New Mexico) and I recently wrote a letter to Science magazine regarding Forster and Renfrew’s rather extraordinary article which states that male immigration is required for language shift. Science declined to publish it, so we’re including it here.

Here is the letter:

Drawing on haploid genetic data from six locations, Forster and Renfrew conclude that language transmission in occupied regions requires immigrant males. There are numerous counter examples to this male-transmission hypothesis in the remaining 99.9% of the world’s languages. For example, while Athabaskan speakers in the American southwest received both Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial genomes from Northern North American, the latter are considerably more widespread in the southwest today (1). Polynesia is also particularly interesting because a mix of East Asian mtDNAs and Melanesian Y-chromosomes comprise current Polynesia groups (2). Even a cursory examination of the anthropological literature would reveal numerous additional examples that paint a considerably more nuanced picture of language spread (3). Even their example Viking is problematic. While it is true that Vikings transmitted both Y-chromosomes and Scandinavian languages to Iceland, only their Y-chromosomes survived in England and Russia.

These examples belie the complex nature of biological and linguistic change and, more importantly, the fact that language change is social, not genetic. Moreover, their view of language change is decidedly non-evolutionary. Husbands do not pass their languages unchanged to offspring, and languages are not transmitted in a single generation following initial contact. Instead, language change occurs over multiple generations, with continual exchange between migrant and indigenous languages. Language borrowing in turn affects the lexicon and grammar of both sets of languages, contributing to a pace of change that far outstrips that in genetics.

We reject the sweeping male-centric view presented by Forster and Renfrew and advocate a more thoughtful examination of the nature, causes, and meaning of biological and linguistic evolution and co-evolution.

1.                  R. S. Malhi et al., Am J Phys Anthropol 137, 412 (Dec, 2008).
2.                  M. Kayser et al., Current Biology 10, 1237 (Oct 19, 2000).
3.                  L. Campbell, American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America (Oxford University Press, New York, 1997)

And here is Science’s response. Of the many reasons for not publishing this letter, saying that they only publish “positive” responses is damning. How can a serious scientific publication maintain such a policy?

Dear Dr. Bowern,

Thank you for submitting an E-letter to Science responding to the Perspective, titled “Mother Tongue and Y Chromosomes.” We have read over your contribution, but will not be able to publish it. We are currently only posting those letters most likely to promote positive and stimulating discussion online.  We are letting you know as a courtesy in case you wanted to seek another outlet for your letter. 

Please do not reply to this email, as it will not be read by Science. Unfortunately the volume of submissions precludes specific discussions about individual submitted E-letters. 

Sincerely,

The Editors
Science Magazine

Australian Language Polygons and new Centroid files

I’ve finished a *draft* google earth (.kmz) file with locations of Australian languages, organised by family and subgroup.

• Polygons
• Centroid coordinates [new version]

Some things to note:

• You may use these files for education and research purposes only.

• NO commercial use under any circumstances without my written permission.
• NO republication any any circumstances without my written permission.
• You may quote from these files. Please use the following citation: Bowern, C. (2011). Centroid Coordinates for Australian Languages v2.0. Google Earth .kmz file, available from http://pantheon.yale.edu/~clb3/
• These files represent my compilation of many available sources, but are known to be deficient in a number of areas. Some sources are irreconcilable. This work is unsuitable for use as evidence in Native Title (land) claims.
• Please do not repost or circulate these files. Send interested people to this page. I will be updating the files from time to time.
• Please let me know of errors! The easiest way to do this is to change the polygon or centroid point for the language(s) you are correcting, and send me that item as a kml file.
• If you use derivatives of this file (e.g. you calculate language areas from it, convert it to ArcGIS, etc), that’s fine, but please send me a copy of the derivative file

Field Methods Class Pondering

I had lunch with the field methods speaker for the fall class a few days ago. As befits a field methods consultant, she’s awesome! The language we’ll be working on is Fijian, and our speaker has some linguistics training and is very aware of the stylistic and geographical dialect differences in the language.

I am pondering how best to run this class this semester. It seems a waste of our consultant’s abilities to pretend that Fijian is an undescribed isolate. On the other hand, there does not seem to be very much recent published work on the language. There is Schutz’s grammar from 1986 (and Dixon’s grammar, on the Boumaa dialect, from about the same time), but the most recent published dictionary seems to have been compiled by Capell in the 1940s. I’m therefore starting to have a think about what smart students with a smart consultant and a bunch of background materials can do in a semester that would be educational for the students, not too boring for the consultant, and ideally of some use to the profession as a whole. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far, besides the usual term papers for grad students on topics they are interested in:

• Descriptive work using some of the MPI  stimulus kits.
• Web dictionary with sound and examples
• Gesture elicitation
• Prosodic structure elicitation
• JIPA-type phonetic sketch

On the relativism of cultural relativism

I finished The Protectors the other day, and have now started on Raft – a book of short stories written by a doctor who has visited many remote communities. I may finish that on the plane, or I may decide that it’s a bit heavy-going. The One Arm Point story, for example, was about the death of a very senior woman, and I’m pretty sure I know who the main person in the story is. Although the author has disguised the identities of the people involved, because he identifies communities, the number of possible identities is very small. This is a book written, it seems, with the presumption that those with first-hand knowledge of those communities will not read it. It is elegiac, but the message is bleak and disempowering.

But back to the Protectors. This is a very strange book. I could never quite work out whether the author – Stephen Gray – was trying to set himself up as an apologist for the policies that led to the Stolen Generations. On the one hand, he spends a fair amount of time discussing genocide, reactions and justifications of the perpetrators of genocide, and the parallels and non-parallels between Australia, South Africa, and Nazi Germany. On the other hand, however, his stance about motives is highly relativistic. He seems to be arguing that although Aboriginal people have suffered, we have to take into account the motives of the actions of the people who most proximately caused that suffering; such actions were always argued to be in the best interests of  aboriginal people and their children.

This is not a little ironic. One of the justifications for removing children from their families has been a cultural and moral absolutism: all children must be protected, no Australian should have to put up with domestic violence, and so on. All deserve equal protection under the law, along with full access to the rights of law. If one is going to go down the cultural absolutism path, at least it could be applied consistently.

ICHL roundup

I’ve just finished a very pleasant (if humid!) week at the 20th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, ably hosted by Ritsuko Kikusawa and Minpaku, Osaka’s Ethnology Museum.

I mostly went to talks on computational historical linguistics, historical morphology, and historical syntax, though with plenaries and a few other topics thrown in it was a pretty eclectic week. Sorry that there wasn’t any live blogging during the conference, I also had a pretty good week with good food and good company at evening dinners. Here are a couple of thoughts about the conference.

Historical computational linguistics is maturing. I could see this in a few ways; one was the number of good talks on new and exciting topics. The second was in the number of talks which were based on ideas which, shall we say, were a little sketchy. The former were concentrating on general processes of change providing an insight into it – I’d put Fiona Jordan’s and Michael Dunn’s talks in that category, for example (sorry for lack of links, I’m writing this offline). The sketchy talks were essentially reworkings of old problems less well, and in the interests of policy I won’t link to them. But even some of those talks had some promise. For example, there was a talk on using automatic cognate judgments to draw phylograms. It was a neat way to work out similarity, and could probably be tweaked to weight regularity in correspondences, which is far more important than whether two words in two languages have the same sound. At this stage, though, the talk had a tree that was clearly much worse than existing published trees of the family.

Another thing that was good to see was that there was much less of the attitude “I’ll use a lot of fancy mathematics and because you don’t come from that field you won’t be able to criticise it.” I’ve been to several conferences which had a lot of papers like that and they were very counterproductive, in that the authors needlessly alienated sections of their audience, and the results usually didn’t tell us very much about language. There was also less of the “I’ve got a single counter-example so your statistical tendency must be wrong” type of comment, though it wasn’t totally absent.

I also went to a workshop on exaptation/refunctionalization, which included a keynote talk by J C Smith. Brian Joseph gave a talk in that workshop which stirred the possum a bit, by arguing that refunctionalization is just a fancy name for a type of analogy, and we lose sight of the commonalities in different types of analogy when we chose certain parts of the field to give special names to. That may be so, though I wasn’t totally convinced. If we don’t try to anatomize analogical changes, for example, we can lose site of where the gaps in change are, and they can be as revealing as the changes that do happen.

Elly van Gelderen gave a very nice talk with Mary Anne Willie on syntactic change in Athabascan, and the different syntax of object agreement in languages like Navajo vs Northern languages like Slave.

Ted Supala gave a really good plenary talk on change in ASL (with 4 languages and a good test of skype – Ted gave the talk in ASL, and an interpreter in Rochester interpreted it into spoken English; she was then translated into spoken Japanese, which was then translated into JSL. I would have loved to know what the JSL interpreter was actually saying. The talk identified a number of processes of change in ASL, including economy, reanalysis, and loss of iconicity.

So all in all it was an interesting week and historical linguistics is alive and kicking!