Robbeets Martine, Savelyev Alexander (eds.) Language Dispersal Beyond Farming

Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017. — xii, 324 p. — ISBN: 9789027212559."Why do some languages wither and die, while others prosper and spread? Around the turn of the millennium a number of archaeologists such as Colin Renfrew and Peter Bellwood made the controversial claim that many of the world's major language families owe their dispersal to the adoption of agriculture by their early speakers. In this volume, their proposal is reassessed by linguists, investigating to what extent the economic dependence on plant cultivation really impacted language spread in various parts of the world. Special attention is paid to "tricky" language families such as Eskimo-Aleut, Quechua, Aymara, Bantu, Indo-European, Transeurasian, Turkic, Japano-Koreanic, Hmong-Mien and Trans-New Guinea, that cannot unequivocally be regarded as instances of farming/language dispersal, even if subsistence played a role in their expansion"Farming/Language Dispersal: Food for thought / Martine Robbeets
Proto-Quechua and Proto-Aymara agropastoral terms: Reconstruction and contact patterns / Willem F. H. Adelaar
Subsistence terms in Unangam Tunuu (Aleut) / Anna Berge
Lexical recycling as a lens onto shared Japano-Koreanic agriculture / Alexander Francis-Ratte
The language of the Transeurasian farmers / Martine Robbeets
Farming-related terms in Proto-Turkic and Proto-Altaic / Alexander Savelyev
Farming and the Trans-New Guinea family: A consideration / Antoinette Schapper
The domestications and the domesticators of Asian rice / George van Driem
Macrofamilies and agricultural lexicon: Problems and perspectives / George Starostin
Were the first Bantu speakers south of the rainforest farmers? A first assessment of the linguistic evidence / Joseph Koni Muluwa
Expanding the methodology of lexical examination in the investigation of the intersection of early agriculture and language dispersal / Brian D. Joseph
Agricultural terms in Indo-Iranian / Martin Joachim Kümmel
Milk and the Indo-Europeans / Benoit Sagot.