A Story of O: a reconstruction of East Asian ethnolinguistic population prehistory based on language and genes
The hypothetical East Asian linguistic phylum consists of four recognised language families: Austroasiatic, Austro-Tai, Trans-Himalayan and Hmong-Mien. The geographical distribution and the centre of diversity of each language family together with the relative chronology of branching of each of the four family trees permits inferences about the dispersal and likely geographical origin of each of these language families. Twenty years ago, it was observed that the global geography of language families often corresponded with the distribution of Y chromosomal markers. The ubiquitous albeit not universal correlation of paternal lineages with the geographical distribution of language families suggested that a subset of the paternal ancestors of many language communities also happened to represent the linguistic ancestors of these populations. The Austroasiatic, Austro-Tai, Trans-Himalayan and Hmong-Mien language families are each found to correlate with one of four subclades of the Y chromosomal haplogroup O occurring in high frequency in the modern populations speaking these languages. Data from both historical linguistics and population genetics enable us to present a reconstruction of the founding dispersals of these language families. Finally, both the findings of rice genetics and the type of evidence which Adolphe Pictet first named linguistic palaeontology identify the ancestral ethnolinguistic groups who must have been involved with the domestication of cultivated Asian rice.
The Isabel Dalhousie Lecture is given each year by the Isabel Dalhousie Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanites. This fellowship is named after Isabel Dalhousie, the heroine of Alexander McCall Smith’s Edinburgh-based The Sunday Philosophy Club series. Previous holders of the fellowship have included Professors Edward and Cheryl Mendelson (New York), Professor Juliette Wells (Baltimore), and Michael Longley (Belfast).
This year the Isabel Dalhousie Lecture is to be given by Professor George van Driem, who directs the Linguistics Institute at the University of Bern, where he occupies the Chair of Historical Linguistics. He has written several grammars of languages of the Himalayas, viz. Limbu, Dumi, Bumthang and Dzongkha. In 2001, he authored the two-volume ethnolinguistic handbook entitled Languages of the Himalayas. In Bhutan, he discovered two languages previously unknown to science, Gongduk and Black Mountain Mönpa. He collaborates with linguists and population geneticists to reconstruct human population prehistory, publishing articles in journals such as Nature, Science and Human Genetics. He wrote the history of tea, entitled The Tale of Tea (2019). His students and post-docs conduct pioneering work in the Asian heartland.
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