The Chomskyan revolution, focusing on Language as something in speakers’ brains, has tended to divert attention from the more traditional, speaker-external view of Language as a shared property of human societies, with an existence, and variation, in space and time. The first study of how words vary as a function of geographical location – Yang Xiong’s Fangyan – appeared early, in the Han dynasty China of 53 BC. The systematic discipline of Dialect Geography arose much later, in late 19th century Europe, ultimately giving rise in the first part of the 20th century to major surveys which plot the distribution of […]

HKU Linguistics Seminar Series Linguistic data can reveal how people have been migrating and interacting over thousands of years.  Vocabulary data, for example, shows how language families such as Indo-European have spread, and potentially where and when they originated (e.g. Bouckaert et al. 2011).  Linguistic structures (word orders, phonemes, grammatical categories and so on) can also be informative about history, and especially about the history of language contact, because neighbouring languages often share structures in common even when they are unrelated.  Because of this, languages often form linguistic areas, geographical regions where certain structures have come to predominate, such as tone and numeral […]