engleski

Reflections of language boundaries and linguistic evolution in population structure

A major goal of anthropological genetics is the assessment of the roles played by different microevolutionary forces in the origin and maintenance of genetic variation. A basic finding of human population-structure analysis which deals with gametic union and all the factors associated with the mating process, is that cultural variables influence this process, while language is one of the most important of these cultural variables. A number of anthropological studies throughout the world carried out at every population level, from local and regional to global, have demonstrated consistently a direct relation between genetic diversity and language diversity. This evolutionary congruence is explained by the similarity between factors which operate to increase and consolidate genetic differences between and within populations, such as migration, geographic separation, or isolation, and the processes by which linguistic variation within a community can develop into differentiation of dialects or languages.The assumption that the two evolutions follow in principle the same history and mechanism of sequences of fissions was tested by the analysis of genetic (gene frequences) and linguistic data (dialectal variation) for Middle Dalmatia. The results obtained suggest that linguistic differentiation has been proceeding in a similar manner to genetic differentiation, while the pattern of analyzed villages in discriminant analysis reflects language group discreteness through their approximate clustering from the same dialect area.

language boundaries; linguistic evolution; population structure; anthropology

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