There are approximately 420 language families in the world. These families have an uneven geographical distribution, with a few scattered hotspots of linguistic diversity surrounded by larger areas in which widespread language families predominate. These distributions result from socio-historical processes which have developed within particular natural environments. Therefore, understanding the evolution of modern patterns of linguistic diversity lies at the intersection of the social and environmental sciences. However, these research traditions have remained largely separate from each other and focus on different aspects of the same situation: the role of social and linguistic dynamics, on the one hand, and environmental drivers on the other. Both fields have yielded important but partial insights. We believe that further progress crucially depends on the integration of these complementary approaches.

With this potential in mind, this project combines an extensive new open database on linguistic distributions, spatial modelling and areal linguistics. Our focus is on South America, which is home to over a quarter (26%) of the world’s language families. The bulk of this diversity has likely developed in the last 15-20K years since the initial peopling of the continent. The development of this extraordinary diversity challenges our assumptions about the development of linguistic diversity, which makes it an excellent region to study the development of linguistic diversity. The aim of this project is to disentangle the roles of social and environmental factors on the emergence of linguistic diversity patterns of the continent. The project has two main components, which will be the focus of two strongly related PhD projects, one at the Faculty of Geosciences at Utrecht University, the other at the Faculty of the Humanities at Leiden University.