Tag: bilingualism

Pre-Germanic born out of a Proto-Finnic substrate in Scandinavia

indo-european-yamnaya-corded-ware

A commenter, Old Europe, drew my attention to the Uralic (Finnic-Saamic) substrate in Germanic proposed by Schrijver in Chapter V. Origins of Language Contact and the Origins of the Germanic Languages, Routledge (2014).

I wanted to share here some interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):

NOTE. I have avoided many detailed linguistic discussions. You should read the whole chapter to check them out.

The origins of the Germanic subfamily of Indo-European cannot be understood without acknowledging its interactions with a language group that has been its long-time neighbour: the Finnic subgroup of the Uralic language family. Indo-European and Uralic are

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Migration, acculturation, and the maintenance of between-group cultural variation

Preprint at BioRxiv, Migration, acculturation, and the maintenance of between-group cultural variation, by Alex Mesoudi (2017)

Abstract:

How do migration and acculturation affect within- and between-group cultural variation? Classic models from population genetics show that migration rapidly breaks down between-group genetic structure. However, in the case of cultural evolution, migrants (or their children) can acculturate to local cultural behaviors via social learning processes such as conformity, potentially preventing migration from eliminating between-group cultural variation. To explore this verbal claim formally, here I present models that quantify the effect of migration and acculturation on between-group cultural variation, first for a

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