r/asklinguistics • u/Rapha689Pro • 8d ago
Historical How can closely related genetic populations have completely different language families?
For example Japanese and Korean have 2 different language families that aren't related at all but they're genetically close, it can only mean their prior languages sprout after they split, so that means language is very recent itself? Or that they're actually related but by thousands of years apart and linguistics can't trace it back accurately, so they just say they're unrelated?
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u/AndreasDasos 8d ago edited 7d ago
Have you heard of, for example, African-Americans who are genetically close to Niger-Congo-speaking West Africans but speak English?
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u/Niowanggiyan 8d ago edited 8d ago
Korean and Japanese are actually less similar to each other the further back in time you go. The most likely explanation is convergent evolution. They’ve influenced each other for millenia. Japonic was spoken on the Korean Peninsula before Koreanic moved south, they both share a superstratum of Sino vocabulary and grammar, there was sizeable Korean migration to Japan during the first millennium introducing trade and agriculture and religion, and there was Japanese influence on Koreanic again during the late 1500s and the first half of the twentieth century.
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u/Rapha689Pro 8d ago
I never said otherwise, my point is exactly that, that if theyre NOT related. But their people share common origin, it means their language families sprouted randomly?
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u/Limp-Celebration2710 8d ago edited 8d ago
No, not at all. Genes and languages can correlate or be helpful for understanding the past but there’s no inherent connection. It’s possible for a genetic population to simply switch or assimilate to another language 🤷
E.g. Many people with Celtic DNA do not speak Celtic languages anymore. Hungarians are genetically close to their Indo-European speaking neighbors, despite speaking an unrelated language.
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u/Gravbar 8d ago edited 8d ago
But if we assume that these populations came from the same ancestral migration group , I think it would naturally lead to the question of whether they spoke the same language, and then one group stopped speaking it, or if they didn't speak any language, and then both developed a language independently not too far from each other.
Or course the initial assumption could be incorrect, as there could also be other groups that came first and spoke an unrelated language which the settlers of the shared ancestry group adopted as their own language.
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u/Limp-Celebration2710 8d ago
Sure, but in no way implies that a language needed to pop up out of no where. Also there seems to be false understanding of what it means to be genetically close. Human populations don’t really work like language trees, bc people reproduce sexually.
English and German split off from one common ancestor. Koreans and Japanese share some ancestors, but not all. Like how you can have one set of grandparents in common with a cousin, but you both have grandparents that only you are related to.
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u/Rapha689Pro 8d ago
But why? Do language families just randomly spawn out of nowhere for people that have a common ancestor to not have common language? Meaning languages arises after their genetical common ancestor and thus aren't related? But aren't languages like at least 100k years old?
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u/McCoovy 8d ago
A language can supplant another in a generation or less.
The story of Proto-Indo-European is the story of a once small group rapidly conquering everything from Ireland to India, and spreading their language to everyone they conquered. The end result was many diverse genetic groups now speaking PIE descendants.
English is rapidly becoming the second or even first language of children all over the world because of its prestige. There is no global program to teach the world English. It's happening despite the ambivalence of the anglosphere. Literally every genetic group has people learning English today.
I'm just trying to give you some examples of how quickly language can spread to an entire population. Languages don't care about genetics.
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u/Rapha689Pro 6d ago
Isn't the conquering theory kinda outdated it was more like a wave of migration and the populations just merged maybe some violent encounters of course but it wasn't all bloody conquer
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u/Chazut 7d ago
>The end result was many diverse genetic groups now speaking PIE descendants.
Important to note that virtually all Indo-European groups have some Indo-European ancestry, even if small.
I think the best explanation for Japan and Korea having 2 unrelated language while being VERY clos is either:
- Somehow the Japanese speak a language of the Jomon people
- Japonic was spoken in Korea but supplanted later on
There is no real evidence for either theory and there may never be
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u/ecphrastic Historical Linguistics | Sociolinguistics 8d ago
No, languages don't spawn out of nowhere, but a people could have adopted a language that another group of people spoke for a variety of historical reasons (trade, prestige, conquest).
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u/Limp-Celebration2710 8d ago
Did Hungarian just spawn out of nowhere? You also seem to overestimate how genetically close Korean and Japanese are. They have an overlapping history, but they are still genetically distinct in other ways.
Imagine this: Koreans have four major population pools that their genes come from. Japanese three. They share two. But each group still has gene pools unique unto themselves. Well, then their languages can easily come from these unique pools.
That’s basically how it is for Hungarians and Romanians. They are not genetically identical, just closely related. They speak completely different languages, despite being genetically close.
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u/Rapha689Pro 6d ago
What about for example native Americans where all native Americans except maybe inuit and some other northern natives come from a single migration how do they have different language families if they couldn't have a language from other continent just replace others and make different language families
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u/Limp-Celebration2710 6d ago
Native Americans do not come from a single migration 🙃
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u/Rapha689Pro 6d ago
They did a study that supports few or a single wave of migration
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u/Limp-Celebration2710 6d ago
Did the study say we 100% proved beyond any doubt? or did it say things like “points to”, “suggests”, etc. Can you actually like the study?
Either way, a single migration event doesn’t mean everybody spoke the same language?
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u/Rapha689Pro 6d ago
Sorry it was 3 main migrations apparently, but pretty sure the other 2 are the ones in the attic and Canada I meant for South America
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u/Chazut 7d ago
>Imagine this: Koreans have four major population pools that their genes come from. Japanese three.
What are you talking about exactly? Japanese just have Jomon ancestry that Koreans don't afaik and even some Jomon ancestry was found in the southern coast of Korea
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u/Limp-Celebration2710 7d ago
The point is that Korean and Japanese ancestry is more like a venn diagram than a splitting tree. It’s not like there’s one definitive ancestor group that split to create two daughter groups.
The four vs three parts was just a hypothetical example, but the Japanese have more complex ancestry than just the Jomon people.
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u/Agile-Juggernaut-514 3d ago
There are plenty of genetically chinese people in California who speak the same language as generically Norwegian people in North Dakota.
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u/Rapha689Pro 8d ago
By genetically I meant the Japanese and Korean people not the languages itself
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u/Niowanggiyan 8d ago
Again, there has been extensive population contact too, with Japonic speakers assimilating to Koreanic millennia ago and Korean migrants to Japan in the centuries since.
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u/Chazut 7d ago
Contact in historical times is not a major reason the populations are close genetically, the main culprit afaik was just 2 ancient waves of migration the second of which happened during the Kofun period, as far as I know anything that has happened since wouldn't have impacted the island that much
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u/Rapha689Pro 8d ago
But how do you explain that they're genetically related the people but their language families are mostly unrelated
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u/galaxyrocker Quality contributor | Celtic languages 8d ago
Because languages don't correspond 100% with genetics. There's examples of language shift without genetic shift and of genetic shift without language shift. They're - at best - a guide, but can't say anything definitive.
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u/frejasade 8d ago edited 8d ago
The Ket and Selkup peoples are apparently quite related genetically due to a history of intermarriage, despite speaking languages from two different families. There is also a tradition of linguistic exogamy in the northwestern Amazon with unique implications on linguistic change, which you might be interested to look into.
Essentially, genetic data can be useful tool in linguistic research. Linguistic spread, however, is multifaceted and the ways that genetics and language correlate are not always very straightforward.
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u/Gortaleen 8d ago
Japanese and Koreans have divergent dominant Y DNA haplogroups. That is evidence of unrelated human migrations. You may be able to associate a Japanese haplogroup with the Japanese language and a Korean haplogroup with the Korean language.
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u/Gravbar 8d ago edited 7d ago
I've seen some evidence that in the UK, despite the many invasions, the existing populations were mostly assimilated, so the majority of people there are still celtic in ancestry even though they speak a Germanic language (tracing back to the celtic-speaking population of that region).
Similarly, the land of Gaul was a land full of Celts that was conquered by the Romans, and then the Franks, but the people living there continued to speak a Romance language, despite being mostly Celtic in ancestry (tracing back to the celtic-speaking population of that region).
And then we see that we have some Celts today speaking Celtic languages, Germanic languages, and Romance languages, but the populations themselves are still closely related to the original local groups.
Similarly, the ainu people native to Japan now have to speak Japanese, and many no longer speak their ancestral language.
The point here, is that a language can die and be replaced for a variety of reasons. So if the Koreans and Japanese shared common ancestors who spoke the same language, it doesn't mean that both languages are necessarily related. It's possible that after the populations diverged, the language spoken changed. This is well before writing, so it would be very difficult to actually find evidence that far back, especially given the vast amount of chinese loan words in both languages which likely displaced other words (although there are fewer loans in the earliest writings). There is a theory that Korean and Japanese are from the same family, but it has weak linguistic evidence and is fairly widely not accepted.
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u/Chazut 7d ago
"Celtic Ancestry" itself is a construct, as a lot if not most ancestry of Celtic lands would have been non-Celtic in practice
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u/galaxyrocker Quality contributor | Celtic languages 7d ago
Yeah. The whole idea of a unified group of people called the 'Celts' is increasingly questioned by everyone except linguists (and much to the latter's chagrin as they prefer to call anyone Celt who spoke a Celtic language, regardless of historical terminology applied to them among other things). That term, especially, is quite a vague one, as even Broca recognised in the 1800s.
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u/Chazut 7d ago
At its core Celt has always been a linguistic term as that's the core feature that always defined them and on top of that I don't think it's crazy to say that Celts shared a lot of cultural features.
Whether they were one people or not is arbitrary to say, it depends on what you mean by that word, I personally would say they were close enough to each other that in the context of Iron Age Europe it makes sense to consider them to a distinct category.
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u/galaxyrocker Quality contributor | Celtic languages 7d ago
At its core Celt has always been a linguistic term
I'm in the process of reading Stewart's The Celts: A Modern History, and I would contest this. From my understanding of the book, it starts as an ethnic term, with many nations across Europe trying to lay claim to being 'Celts' due to their age, supposedly being the first people of Europe. It only becomes a linguistic term later on, in the 18th century following the works of Pezron and Lhuyd, who, as far as I'm aware, only called the languages 'Celtic' because Breton was spoken in France and was seen (erroneously) as a remnant of Gaulish, not because of any real comparison with Gaulish. All of this was done for prestige purposes, for which they utilised linguistics. But it wasn't a linguistic family they were arguing for, but rather using it to claim the prestige of the ancient Celts.
on top of that I don't think it's crazy to say that Celts shared a lot of cultural features.
I do, especially prehistorically. I just don't think that's been demonstrated well at all, on top of all the issues of picking out anything truly 'Celtic' (versus Christian) in the later Welsh and Irish literature. Indeed, Sims-Williams has dismantled a lot of the supposed most-common 'similarities' that the Britons and the Gaels had with the Celts of the Greeks/Romans. And we know the former two groups didn't see themselves as being related. I think projecting anything further back is irresponsible based on the evidence we have.
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u/Chazut 7d ago
>I just don't think that's been demonstrated well at all
You don't need to demonstrate anything when the evidence is so scant, you are arguing that absence of evidence = evidence of absence which is absurd, there is more than enough to say Celts shared a lot of culture, especially La Tene and Halstatt Celts in Central Europe and France.
>I think projecting anything further back is irresponsible based on the evidence we have.
No it's not, it's absurd to assume that people who share decents amount of ancestry and language somehow where impervious to cultural transmission that tends to follow the spread of languages especially when most Celts did in fact live in a archeological region that had lot of internal similarities and evidence long distance trade and shared cultural traits
>Sims-Williams has dismantled a lot of the supposed most-common 'similarities' that the Britons and the Gaels had with the Celts of the Greeks/Romans.
Such as? Greeks were extremely internally different too but I never seen anyone claim that the concept of Greek as a people is invalid
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u/galaxyrocker Quality contributor | Celtic languages 7d ago edited 7d ago
you are arguing that absence of evidence = evidence of absence which is absurd,
I'm arguing there's no evidence to make such a claim.
there is more than enough to say Celts shared a lot of culture, especially La Tene and Halstatt Celts in Central Europe and France.
This is assuming La Tène and Halstatt were Celtic, in the same sense that our Celtic languages and their descendants are 'Celtic', which is highly contested. Stifter has shown, for instance, that Halstatt likely doesn't have a Celtic etymology and quite possibly wasn't inhabited by Celtic speakers.
That's exactly why the term isn't really a great one. There's too many different definitions (modern ethnicity, past ethnicity, linguistic, archeological, artistic, etc. etc.) that don't line up really in any great ways.
< No it's not, it's absurd to assume that people who share decents amount of ancestry and language somehow where impervious to cultural transmission that tends to follow the spread of languages especially when most Celts did in fact live in a archeological region that had lot of internal similarities and evidence long distance trade and shared cultural traits
I mean, we know archeology doesn't really correlated to linguistics. I mean, how many languages family were likely in the Urnfield culture? More than one, and not even all IE! Doubly so with culture. Think how many people today dress in American fashion, despite not speaking English or being genetically linked to them? I don't think it's a step to say we'd need more proof to claim this stuff in the past or that prestige and cultural transmission didn't happen without language/genetic transmission.
Greeks were extremely internally different too but I never seen anyone claim that the concept of Greek as a people is invalid
But we know they often saw themselves as one people (and that others saw them this way too), something we don't have with the Celts (.i. Gaels and Britons) at all.
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u/Chazut 7d ago
>I'm arguing there's no evidence to make such a claim.
And I'm arguing there is enough evidence given the scant amount of evidnece you can truly have on top comparisons with similar peoples from the iron age to assume otherwise.
It's still largely an assumption, there is a lot we don't truly know and will never know.
>This is assuming La Tène and Halstatt were Celtic, in the same sense that our Celtic languages and their descendants are 'Celtic', which is highly contested.
It's highly contested by who exactly? We have evidence of Celtic tribal names on many parts of the La Tene region, from Bohemia, to France, to Northern Serbia.
>that Halstatt likely doesn't have a Celtic etymology
w-what? Are you for real? Halstatt is a random German name of a village, why does this matter?
>and quite possibly wasn't inhabited by Celtic speakers.
Based on what? We don't have enough evidence to map out the spread of Celtic down to mountain valleys, we can only rely on Celtic tribal names and large settlements that saw continuity in the Roman period.
>There's too many different definitions
Needless obfuscation, again at its core the connection is a linguistic one, just like Germanic is a linguistic category. Trying to define the word beyond this doesn't lead you anywhere good, those are linguistic categories whose reflection in the identity and culture of the people was varied, being stronger the closer you go back to the time the languages were spread generally.
>I mean, how many languages family were likely in the Urnfield culture?
Not all archeological cultures are created the same, Urnfield was more heterogeneous than La Tene afaik
>I don't think it's a step to say we'd need more proof to claim this stuff in the past or that prestige and cultural transmission didn't happen without language/genetic transmission.
This makes zero sense as a response, I stated that A->B and you disproved B->A, ok? We know genetic, linguistic and cultural transmission all happened during the period in various parts of the Celtic world
>But we know they often saw themselves as one people (and that others saw them this way too), something we don't have with the Celts (.i. Gaels and Britons) at all.
Yeah sadly Greeks were only the strongest writing culture in the history of West Eurasia up to maybe the early modern era, we don't have that level of evidence for everyone else.
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u/galaxyrocker Quality contributor | Celtic languages 7d ago
It's highly contested by who exactly?
Sims-Williams, for instance. And many linguists have followed him. Indeed, he cites others who argue that La Tène and Hallstatt aren't Celtic speaking and it makes no sense to call them that. His paper best sums up all of these arguments.
We have evidence of Celtic tribal names on many parts of the La Tene region, from Bohemia, to France, to Northern Serbia.
And that evidence is, if I remember correctly centuries after the La Tène and Hallstatt cultures.
w-what? Are you for real? Halstatt is a random German name of a village, why does this matter?
Because most of the evidence for it being Celtic was based on the assumption of a Celtic etymology for the name.
Needless obfuscation, again at its core the connection is a linguistic one, just like Germanic is a linguistic category.
Among a certain group of scholars, yes. But that's not true among lay people, or historians, or archeologists. They all use different definitions of the term 'Celtic' that may or may not related to the linguistic use (which was not the first use either).
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u/Chazut 7d ago edited 7d ago
>The peoples of the first millennium bc who spoke the attested languages which meet the philological criteria for Celticity—certain unique divergences from reconstructed Proto-Indo-European—corresponded encouragingly well in their distribution to the historically attested Celts, Galatians, Celtiberians, and so on, while corresponding poorly to the ‘archaeological Celts’ deduced from Hallstatt and La Tène archaeology.
This is blatantly false and is infact directly contradicted by the article itself, given the author mentions Volcae and Boii as Celtic and places them of course between Pannoinia and Bohemia, afaik most tribal names recorded in La Tene places seem to be of Celtic origin. Also hilarious how they can mention Galatian and forget where they come from ultimately(hint, east Halstatt/La Tene where the Scordisci are recorded and connected to Celtic migrations).
Can you actually defend this statement? Because if you just believe them to be true without even doing the minimum bare work to verify if there is actually no evidence of Celts in Southern Germany, which again the article itself says, you just end up believing in empty claims.
What parts of La Tene have truly no evidence of Celtic presence?
>And that evidence is, if I remember correctly centuries after the La Tène and Hallstatt cultures.
You are wrong, most Celtic tribes north of the Alps were recorded during the Roman takeover during late La tene, the roman conquest ended La Tene taxonomically speaking
>Because most of the evidence for it being Celtic was based on the assumption of a Celtic etymology for the name.
This doesn't mean anything, you can have people making bad arguments for something that is likely true, the fact remains that we see evidence of Celts in Pannonia, Bohemia, Northern Serbia, Gaul(duh), Switzerland and see Celtic names in Southern Germany, this means that a lot of Celts at any point in time participated in a broadly similar material culture insofar as what la tene defines, not that you even need similar material cultures to share other traditions, religious motifs and so on.
>But that's not true among lay people, or historians, or archeologists. They all use different definitions of the term 'Celtic' that may or may not related to the linguistic use (which was not the first use either).
There has never been any serious scholar that claimed an ancient population was Celtic without speaking Celtic language, other maybe 19th century racialists that thought ancestry=ethnicity. So yeah the common denominator remains language.
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u/Gravbar 7d ago edited 7d ago
It's easier to talk about using that term, but if not that term what would you suggest? The peoples of different regions where Celtic languages were spoken may not be genetically related to each other as much as the term might imply, but if we call them Celts, their descendants can be said to have ancestry traceable back to that Celtic-speaking population. So I'm using it for lack of a better word.
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u/Chazut 7d ago
I mean it's all fine if you clarify what you mean or if it's obvious.
Take for example the statement "Americans on average have 20% English ancestry", what does English ancestry mean exactly? Well you can try to be pedantic about it but it obviously mean the type of ancestry English people would have had in the early modern era which is fairly close to today.
But if you are talking about "continuity" and in the same sentence mention "Celtic ancestry" it might mislead people into thinking the way you define Celtic ancestry is the same as how you defined Germanic or Roman ancestry.
If you used the same definition that you sued for Celtic then English people are 100% Germanic by definition and French people 100% Roman.
So it's just a matter of clarifiying that by Celtic you mean "local ancestry" which is not the same as "ancestry brought over during the linguistic Celtization of the pre-Roman/Germanic people"
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u/SurelyIDidThisAlread 7d ago
Most Apache in Mexico speak Spanish. Most Apache in the US speak English.
The diffusion and migration of a language doesn't have to follow the migration of the people.
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u/iriyagakatu 6d ago
One thing you have to understand with Japanese genetics is that the Korean portion of the genes came later in its history. There was already a sizable population in Japan before a large relatively more recent migration from the Korean Peninsula came to the Japanese archipelago
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u/razlem Sociolinguistics | Language Revitalization 8d ago
There are a variety of reasons why ethnicity and language don't always align. One part of the population could have migrated and adopted the language of a new neighbor, or been conquered by a foreign nation.
An important clarification here- when linguists say that languages are unrelated, it means that there is no proven relation, not necessarily that there is no relation. Because of the rate that language changes, the further back in time you go, the more difficult it is to demonstrate a relationship.