Our research
We study late human prehistory, integrating archaeological, genetic and linguistic evidence to reconstruct various aspects of human evolution and culture. Special focus is on the languages of North and East Asia, the Transeurasian languages in particular.
Transeurasian
The term “Transeurasian” refers to a large group of geographically adjacent languages, stretching from the Pacific in the East to the Baltic and the Mediterranean in the West, that include up to five well-established linguistic families: Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic. Although most linguists would agree that these languages are historically related, they disagree on the precise nature of this relationship: are all similarities generated by borrowing or are some residues of inheritance?
Key objectives
The origin and early dispersal of speakers of Transeurasian languages is among the most disputed issues of Eurasian population history. The Archaeolinguistic Research Group addresses this question from an interdisciplinary perspective. Our key objective is to integrate linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence in a single approach, for which we use the term “Triangulation”.
Current projects
Within Eurasia, our current research projects focus on:
- Reconstructing the language and lives of ancient people from the Steppe to the Ryukyu Islands
- Detecting homelands of ancestral speech communities
- Building and dating language trees
- Modelling language shift and substratum interference
- Comparing kinship systems
- Mapping prehistoric language spread on cultural diffusion and population migration
- Integrating big datasets of words, artefacts and ancient DNA into a unified approach
- Farming/ language dispersal: testing which languages were spread with agriculture
- Tracing the spread of Bronze Age steppe pastoralism through language
- Correlating early language contact with cultural interaction and population admixture
- Understanding how extreme environments and conditions affected language change
Institutions
The Language and the Anthropocene research group is an interdisciplinary and international team headed by Martine Robbeets and based at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology (former MPI for the Science of Human History) in Jena. It is the successor to the Archaeolinguistic and Eurasia3angle Groups. Eurasia3angle was funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant from 2015 to 2021. Doctoral researchers are embedded in the Doctoral Program of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz.
Max-Planck-Institut für Geoanthropologie
Kahlaische Strasse 10
D 07745 Jena
Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität
FB 05, Department of English and Linguistics
Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft
D 55099 Mainz
Language and the Anthropocene