ABSTRACT
The farming/language dispersal hypothesis (Bellwood 2001; Renfrew 1996; Bellwood and Renfrew 2003) claims that the formation of some of the world’s major language families followed from the establishment of sustainable agricultural economies: a resulting increase in population densities led to founding dispersals by populations originally speaking dialects of the same language seeking new agricultural lands; in time these dialects evolved into diversified language families. The farming/language dispersal hypothesis – which should not be taken as an absolutist theory claiming that all language families have their origins in an agricultural dispersal, or that all agricultural dispersals result in identifiable families (see Bellwood 2005) – is an attractive explanatory mechanism, because shift to agriculture will normally produce an increase in population densities, because farming populations with expanding demographies and plenty of available land around them will normally expand to occupy this land, and because once-homogeneous languages will normally undergo distance-based linguistic differentiations when spoken over large geographical areas.
