LSA 118: Linguistic prehistory and population genetics

Bernard Comrie | session 1 | MW 1:30 – 3:15, 101 Moffitt Hall

Although the use of language to construct hypotheses relating to prehistory has a long tradition, recent advances both within linguistics (e.g. typology, language contact studies) and in other disciplines (e.g. archaeology, genetics) provide us with a much richer set of tools to assess the contribution that linguistics and other disciplines can make to unraveling such aspects of human prehistory as population migration, population contact, and physical culture. The aim of this course will be to examine recent literature and ongoing research that deal with the interaction of linguistic and other evidence in studying human prehistory.

Reading: Selected materials available online.

Areas of linguistics: Areal and historical linguistics