Language, culture, and linguistic prehistory

Historical linguistic evidence is a key element in the reconstruction of prehistoric cultures, the migrations of people bearing cultures, and the diffusion of cultural elements. ‘Culture history’ in a wider sense, with more of an emphasis on material culture, was widely used as the term for a dominant approach in archaeology in the first half of the twentieth century, but the term went out of favour. The field of linguistic prehistory, however, continues many of the aims and methods of culture history with emphasis on historical linguistic evidence, often combined with the findings of archaeology and other disciplines such as palaeobiology and biological genetics. The scholar of the Austronesian language family, Robert Blust, a prominent advocate and successful practitioner of opening the ‘window’ of language on to prehistory and culture history, reminds us that humans have been “inadvertently recording the stuff of social and cultural history in … daily speech since long before the advent of writing” (1996: 28). This record is largely preserved in the languages spoken in recent times and can be interpreted by historical linguistics to teach as much as, and in some areas, much more than archaeology can about the prehistoric past.