Local Organizer:

Tom Güldemann (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)
Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)

Contact:

Claudia Schmidt (Conference Co-ordinator)



Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Department of Linguistics
Deutscher Platz 6
04103 Leipzig
Germany

 1. Internal historical aspects

• What is the demographic range of hunter-gatherer speech communities?
• Are there special social practices of hunter-gatherers which are relevant for historical linguistics, e.g., linguistic avoidance, social networks transcending language groups, linguistic exogamy, lack of reference varieties and/or reinforcement of linguistic norms?
• What are the patterns of language contact among hunter-gatherer populations and how do these influence language change in them?
• What can be discerned from attested language spreads of hunter- gatherer populations in terms of their historical triggers, underlying social processes, speed, geographical patterns (e.g., correlating with ecological zones), degree of language replacement, etc.?
• What is the range of genealogical diversification in hunter- gatherer language families?
• What are the different patterns of language densities and by what are they determined (e.g., ecological factors etc.)?
• What is the typological profile of areas which predominantly consist of different hunter-gatherer language families (e.g., southern Africa, Australia, Bering Strait, Gran Chaco)?
• What are the differences between non-sedentary~low density and sedentary~high density hunter-gatherer groups?
• Can linguistic elements (e.g., vocabulary) be linked with archaeological signatures? 
  

2. External historical aspects

• What are the patterns of language contact of hunter-gatherers with food producing colonizers (e.g., kind and stability of clientship, etc.)?
• What is the time depth of the earliest contact with food producing colonizers in a certain area?
• Are there differences in contact patterns of hunter-gatherers with agriculturalists vs. pastoralists?
• What are the circumstances of language shift of hunter-gatherers towards languages of their food-producing neighbors (e.g., Okiek, Pygmy, San, Dama, Negrito, Vedda) and do these target languages still betray linguistic traces of their substratum?
• Can hunter-gatherer substrates be identified in other linguistic populations who have incorporated hunter-gatherers?
• Are there cases where a formerly food-producing population (speaking a language of such a group) seems to have acquired a hunter-gatherer subsistence secondarily (e.g., Mlabri) and what can we learn from them? 
  

3. Global geographical patterns

• What is the world-wide distribution of language families whose populations are predominantly/ exclusively hunter-gatherers?
• Are there cases of hunter-gatherer populations with a coastal/seafaring rather than a terrestrial orientation?
• In the case that hunter-gatherers had a profound substrate influence on the first food-producing colonizers on a wider scale, is there any chance to correlate modern areal patterns with the global typological profile before the spread of food production?