--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Francesco Brighenti"
<frabrig@...> wrote:
>
> > ...the invasionist historical paradigm was > > demised long ago
by most of serious researchers. Modern Indologists and Indo-Iranian
historical linguists tend to speak of transfers of > > ideologies,
subsistence systems, language, and spiritual culture from one group
to the other as often as movements of people. > > Such processes do
not necessarily involve large-scale migrations, although actual
physical movement (starting with, e.g., transhumance tricklings in
involving the transference of pastoralist innovations > > from one
population to another, and the emergence of 'khanate'-like
territorial domains) and intermarriage are not excluded. Various
> > types of military interaction, such as cattle raids, actual war-
like > > clashes, battles and even the incidental invasion of
smaller or > > larger bands, groups or tribes may or may not be part
of the picture.
>
> Can you give a better documented example of such processes causing
> language replacement? The nearest example I can think of is the
> replacement of Russian by French among the Russian upper class in
the > 18th century, but could that have resulted in Russia becoming
> French-speaking? Possibly Brussels's speaking French rather than
> Walloons or Flemish is a better example.
Dear Richard,
I dare say there are in the world no fitting documented examples of
a process of language replacement similar to that which occurred in
South Asia. IMOH, this is a still poorly understood _unique_ case.
The élite dominance model is often invoked to explain the phenomenon
of language replacement in the protohistoric Greater Panjab area,
which was a pre-literate and pre-state socio-geographic context at
that time. The `a:rya' technology of religion, the preservation of
the Vedas by oral means, the itinerant brahmins spreading the Vedas
and OIA language(s) throughout the Greater Panjab, and their co-
opting the native élites (mainly, but not solely, through
intermarriage), thus, producing bilinguals in a few generations,
would have greatly contributed to bring about this change. Yet, to
make the élite dominance model work in this context scholars should
more carefully figure out how the migrating Indo-Aryans became the
élite in the Greater Panjab with contextually demonstrating the
incentives (rise in social status, better income, freedom from
persecution etc.) that the speakers of the indigenous language(s)
had once they had adopted, even as bilinguals, the intruding
language.
The following is one of my favourite summaries of this vexed
question (again, by M. Witzel -- the entire paper is worth reading!):
http://users.primushost.com/~india/ejvs/ejvs0703/ejvs0703article.pdf
<< To begin, in any discussion of the 'Aryan problem', one has to
stress vehemently that the 'invasion model' which was still
prominent in the work of archaeologists such as Wheeler
(1966: "Indra stands accused"), has been supplanted by much more
sophisticated models over the past few decades (see Kuiper 1955
sqq., Witzel 1995, Thapar 1968). It must also be underlined that
this development has not occurred because Indologists were reacting,
as is now frequently alleged, to current Indian criticism of the
older theory. Rather, philologists first, and archaeologists
somewhat later, noticed certain inconsistencies in the older theory
and tried to find new explanations, thereby discovering new facts
and proposing a new version of the immigration theories. For some
decades already, linguists and philologists such as Kuiper 1955,
1991, Emeneau 1956, Southworth 1979, archaeologists such as Allchin
1982, 1995, and historians such as R. Thapar 1968, have maintained
that the Indo-Aryans and the older local inhabitants
('Dravidians', 'Mundas', etc.) have mutually interacted from early
on, that many of them were in fact frequently bilingual, and that
even the RV already bears witness to that. They also think, whether
explicitly following Ehret's model (1988, cf. Diakonoff 1985) or
not, of smaller infiltrating groups (Witzel 1989: 249, 1995, Allchin
1995), not of mass migrations or military invasions. However,
linguists and philologists still maintain, and for good reasons,
that some IA speaking groups actually entered from the outside, via
some of the (north)western corridors of the subcontinent.
In fact, we do not presently know how large this particular influx
of linguistically attested outsiders was. It can have been
relatively small, if we apply Ehret's model (1988, derived from
Africa, cf. Diakonoff 1985) which stresses the osmosis (or
a 'billiard ball', or Mallory's Kulturkugel) effect of cultural
transmission. Ehret (1988) underlines the relative ease with which
ethnicity and language shift in small societies, due to the
cultural/economic/military choices made by the local population in
question. The intruding/influencing group bringing new traits may
initially be small and the features it contributes can be fewer in
number than those of the pre-existing local culture. The newly
formed, combined ethnic group may then initiate a recurrent,
expansionist process of ethnic and language shift. The material
record of such shifts is visible only insofar as new prestige
equipment or animals (the "status kit", with new, intrusive
vocabulary!) are concerned. This is especially so if pottery --
normally culture-specific -- continues to be made by local
specialists of a class-based society. Similarly, Anthony
(1995): "Language shift can be understood best as a social strategy
through which individuals and groups compete for positions of
prestige, power, and domestic security... What is important, then,
is not just dominance, but vertical social mobility and a linkage
between language and access to positions of prestige and power... A
relatively small immigrant elite population can encourage widespread
language shift among numerically dominant indigenes in a non-state
or pre-state context if the elite employs a specific combination of
encouragements and punishments. Ethnohistorical cases ...
demonstrate that small elite groups have successfully imposed their
languages in non-state situations."
For an "indigenist" critique of the model arguing for language
replacement in protohistoric South Asia being caused by the
mechanism of élite dominance, see $ H of Vishal Agarwal's online
paper at
http://www.omilosmeleton.gr/english/agarwal.html
Regards,
Francesco Brighenti