"The Language Dynamics of the Ancient Central Andes" Emmy Noether Junior Research Group
The Emmy Noether Junior Research Group "The Language Dynamics of the Ancient Central Andes" was established in 2017. Affiliated with the DFG Center, it is funded by a separate grant to its director Dr. Matthias Urban through the Emmy Noether Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Just like the Inca are often considered the Andean civilization par excellence, the Quechuan language family is frequently portrayed as the prime representative of the Andean languages. Yet in reality, the ancient Central Andean region is characterized by cultural and linguistic diversity and complex interregional relations.
Without neglecting the well studied and widely distributed Central Andean language families such as Quechuan and Aymaran, Dr. Matthias Urban’s independent DFG-funded Emmy Noether Junior Research Group “The language dynamics of the ancient Central Andes” shifts the empirical focus of attention towards the many 'minor' languages that were once spoken in the region (see map).
The group explores how language contact and language shift involving the full original linguistic diversity of the Central Andes can contribute to accounts and theories of the region’s prehistory.
This involves the study of a representative variety of different contact and shift situations within the Central Andes. Andean geography and prehistoric sociocultural practices have given rise to a multitude of such situations, which the group explores both in its broadest scope as well as through detailed case studies. Therein, the group relies on a combination of methods derived from contact linguistics, historical linguistics, and anthropology.
Generally, the group embraces and aims to foster a view of linguistics as embedded into a concert of disciplines oriented to the study of human history and prehistory.
Matthias Urban received undergraduate and graduate training in linguistics at the University of Cologne and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. His postdoctoral work focused on the historical linguistics of the Central Andes and sought to investigate the use of different types of linguistic information –the areal distribution of linguistic features, place and personal names, substrate effects, other contact phenomena including lexical and grammatical borrowing, and the spread of language families–as windows to the prehistory of this culture area. He continues to pursue this approach, which also emphasizes the need to interpret the linguistic record against an interdisciplinary background, further as principal investigator of the Junior Research Group “The languages of the Central Andes”, funded by the German Research Foundation’s Emmy Noether Programme.
Sprachlandschaften. Über die Rolle von Sprache in der Beziehung zwischen Mensch und Umwelt. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
2017
Matthias Urban and Rita Eloranta (eds.) Hans Heinrich Brüning, Diccionario etnográfico de la Costa y Sierra Norte del Perú. Lambayeque: Fondo Editorial de la Facultad de Ciencias Historicas, Sociales y Educativas (FACHSE) / Universidad Nacional Pedro Ruiz Gallo.
Journal Articles :
To appear a
What color are your hearts? 'Liver' and 'lungs' in typological and areal perspective. Linguistic Typology.
To appear b
Chan Chan y su trampa etimológica: respuesta a Cerrón-Palomino. Lexis.
2022a
Terminología marítima en el Lexicon, o Vocabulario de la lengua general del Perú de Domingo de Santo Tomás (1560) y posibles implicaciones para la historia de la familia lingüística quechua. Boletín de la Academia Peruana de la Lengua 70: 13-61. https://doi.org/10.46744/bapl.202102.001
2021a
Matthias Urban and Steven Moran. Altitude and the distributional typology of language structure: ejectives and beyond. PLoS ONE 16 (2): e0245522. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245522
2021b
Mochica pronouns: their internal reconstruction and their significance for worldwide patterns of paradigmatic resemblances in pronominal shapes. International Journal of American Linguistics 87 (2): 279-296. https://doi.org/10.1086/712979
2021c
The impact of language contact on the Quechua varieties of Northern Peru Exploring the lexical evidence. Language Dynamics and Change 11 (1): 77–129. https://doi.org/10.1163/22105832-00902007
Language classification, language contact and Andean prehistory: The North. Language and Linguistics Compass 15 (9): e12414. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12414
Matthias Urban and Chiara Barbieri. North and South in the ancient Central Andes: contextualizing the archaeological record with evidence from linguistics and molecular anthropology. Journal of Anthropological Archeology 60: 101233. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2020.101233
2020c
The representation of the velar nasal in colonial grammars and other pre-modern sources on the languages of the Central Andean region. In: Astrid Alexander-Bakkerus, Rebeca Fernández Rodríguez, Liesbeth Zack, and Otto Zwartjes (eds.): Missionary linguistic studies from Mesoamerica to Patagonia, 299-312. Leiden/Boston: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004427006_012
2019a
Is there a Central Andean linguistic area? A view from the perspective of the “minor” languages. Journal of Language Contact 12 (2): 271-304. https://doi.org/10.1163/19552629-01202002
2019b
Spotlights on the notion of lexical motivation across languages in the western linguistic tradition, from the 16th century to the present. Historiographia Linguistica 46 (1/2): 47-84. https://doi.org/10.1075/hl.00038.urb
2019c
Matthias Urban, Hugo Reyes-Centeno, Kate Bellamy, and Matthias Pache. The areal typology of western Middle and South America: towards a comprehensive view. Linguistics 52 (6): 1403-1463. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2019-0032
Quechua terminology for internal organs of the body: diachronic, typological, and contact perspectives. Studies in Language 42 (3): 505-528. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.16081.urb
2018c
The lexical legacy of substrate languages: a test case from the Southern Ecuadorian highlands. Transactions of the Philological Society 116 (3): 435-459. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.12129
Matthias Pache holds a doctorate degree in linguistics from Leiden University. He is a postdoctoral researcher in the Research Group “The Language Dynamics of the Ancient Central Andes” and focuses on the numerous, often unclassified languages of the Andean region in terms of language contact and linguistic prehistory. So far, Matthias Pache has carried out in-depth research on Quechuan, Aymaran, Lengua X and Mapudungun. He has also extensively investigated languages of Central America and northern South America: Chibchan, Pumé and Chocoan. He has published on a number of topics in descriptive linguistics, the historiography of Native American linguistics and typology. Moreover, his research has a major focus on historical linguistics, including the application of the comparative method in the context of Native South and Central American languages.
Evidence for a Chibcha–Jê connection. International Journal of American Linguistics.
To appear b
Willem F.H. Adelaar and Matthias Pache. Are all language isolates equal? The case of Mapudungun. In: Language Change, Description and Documentation: Studies in Honour of Lyle Campbell, eds. Thiago Chacon, Nala Lee, and Wilson D.L. Silva. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
To appear c
Matthias Pache and Carlos Sánchez Avendaño. The Chibchan language family: An overview. In: Universos chibchas: nuevas aproximaciones a la unidad y la diversidad humana en el área istmo–colombiana, eds. Stephen Beckerman and Juan Camilo Niño Vargas. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes.
2020
Matthias Pache, Sérgio Meira, and Colette Grinevald. Languages of the Isthmo–Colombian Area and its southeastern borderland: Chibchan, Chocoan, Yukpa, and Wayuunaiki. In: Amerindian Socio-Cosmologies between the Andes, Amazonia and Mesoamerica: Toward an Anthropological Understanding of the Isthmo–Colombian Area, ed. Ernst Halbmayer, 61–87. Abingdon/New York: Routledge.
2019
Matthias Urban, Hugo Reyes-Centeno, Kate Bellamy, and Matthias Pache. The areal typology of western Middle and South America: Towards a comprehensive view. Linguistics 57 (6): 1–61.
2018a
Lengua X: An Andean puzzle. International Journal of American Linguistics 84 (2): 265–285.
2018b
Contributions to Chibchan Historical Linguistics. Ph.D. dissertation, Universiteit Leiden.
2017
Matthias Pache, Arjan Mossel, and Willem F.H. Adelaar. Language diversity, contact and change in the Americas: The model of Filippo Salvatore Gilij (1721–1789). In: Language Contact and Change in Mesoamerica and Beyond, eds. Karen Dakin, Claudia Parodi, and Natalie Operstein, 355–382. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
2016a
Pumé (Yaruro) and Chocoan: Evidence for a new genealogical link in northern South America. Language Dynamics and Change 6 (1): 99–155.
2016b
The grammaticalization of plant-part terms in Chibchan languages. International Journal of American Linguistics 82 (4): 425–452.
Nicholas Q. Emlen is a linguistic anthropologist who has conducted extensive ethnographic research on multilingualism, migration, and coffee production on the Andean-Amazonian agricultural frontier of Southern Peru. He also works on the reconstruction of Quechua-Aymara language contact in the ancient Central Andes. In another project, he uses 17th century texts to study multilingualism among Quechua, Aymara, Puquina, and Spanish in the colonial Andes, and he is currently involved in creating digital interfaces for those texts.
Hermann Sonntag started out as a philosopher studying Philosophy and Social Sciences at the University of Leipzig. Via his preoccupation with logic, semantics and language philosophy and his fateful encounter with Finnish, he chose linguistics as the major of his master studies. In his master’s thesis The Typology of Conditional Constructions: The Past-as-Irrealis Hypothesis in a Cross-linguistic Perspective he examined cross-linguistic similarities on the clause- and sentence-level. Now, as a member of Matthias Urban‘s junior research group The Language Dynamics of the Ancient Central Andes, his current dissertation project Lexical Evidence for the Pre-Columbian Trade and Exchange in Western South America tries to shed light on the linguistic and cultural situation in the Ancient Central Andes and beyond by looking into the relevant languages’ lexica for suspicious loan words. Furthermore, Hermann is interested in cross-linguistic grammaticalization paths and cyclic processes in language change, as well as in language complexity and the harnessing of resource-based approaches accounting for language structures and change.
Aviva Shimelman has a PhD in Linguistics from Université Laval and MA's in Political Science and Philosophy from The University of California, Berkeley and the Universidad National Autónoma de México, respectively. She taught linguistics and writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz, California State University at Monterey Bay and San Jose State University, as well as at Beijing Normal University in Zhuhai, China. She has worked in Latin America, principally in Yauyos, Peru, as an independent scholar with the support of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts and in Melanesia, principally in Malakula, Vanuatu, as part of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History team there.
Dr. Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia (External Collaborator)
Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia holds a PhD degree in linguistics from Radboud University Nijmegen/Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He completed his MA degree in general linguistics at Radboud University and his licentiate degree in Hispanic Linguistics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. Currently, he is a postdoctoral research fellow within the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language at the University of Queensland (Australia), and also works as lecturer at the Centre for Asian Studies from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. His work focuses on mapping language variation and change in numerous language families and isolates from South America, the Great Sandy Desert (Australia) and Taiwan under the lenses of his own research program dubbed "Dynamic Linguistics". For the past nine years, he has also focused on the documentation and description of Shawi, a Kawapanan language spoken in Peruvian north-western Amazonia.
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