The Transeurasian homeland: where, what, and when?

• Main Author: Robbeets, Martine
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2020
• Subjects: Tungusic languages
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198804628.003.0045

The Farming Language Dispersal Hypothesis boldly claims that agricultural dispersal is an important factor in shaping linguistic diversity. This view has been sharply criticized, especially for the regions currently occupied by the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages, where farming is often unviable. Here, the power of linguistic scholarship is combined with archeological and genetic research to show that the spread of the Transeurasian languages (i.e. Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages) is indeed driven by agriculture. The integration of the three disciplines in a single approach, for which I use the term “triangulation,” reveals a sequence of linguistic expansions that can be linked to the spread of millet and rice agriculture as well as to the dispersal of the Ancient North and South East Asian gene pool in Neolithic and Bronze Age North East Asia.