Review Of A Language Family Analysis From Farmers And Their Languages: The First Expansions

Review of a language family analysis from
“Farmers and their languages: The first expansions”
In your last assignment, you were asked to give a summary of the Diamond and Bellwood article.
In this assignment, you are asked to give a review of one of the eleven language families they
discuss with respect to their general hypothesis. The distinction between a summary and a review
is that reviews are critical evaluations and, therefore, include well-supported commentary from the
reviewer as to whether or not a given argument is a good or bad one.
Your task: (1) Pick one of the eleven language families Diamond and Bellwood discuss in the
article. It will probably be easiest to pick one you already have some familiarity with, but this is
not required. (2) Summarize their basic claim as to how this family fits relates to their hypothesis.
The article can be pretty dense in places. So, a good summary might actually be considerably
longer than what you find in the article itself because you'll have to fill in some gaps in their
discussion—in particular you will probably need to discuss the distribution of some of the attested
languages in a given family. (3) Evaluate Diamond and Bellwood's claims. Do you think they have
the right explanation? Have they ignored some important facts? What explanation would you give
for the distribution of the family in question?
I encourage you, in evaluating Diamond and Bellwood's analyses, to use examples from other
language families to reinforce any claims you make for the language family you choose. For
example, if Diamond and Bellwood attribute some aspect of the spread of some family to language
shift, you may want to bring up an example of language shift from some other family that you
know about, if it has bearing on your general arguments.
This is the final assignment for the class (excepting the last exam). Therefore, it is designed to be
more challenging than some of the earlier assignments. The overarching goal here is to have you
evaluate claims about why the languages of the world are distributed the way they are.
You may feel free to do outside research for this paper, but this is not required. Information
from Guns, Germs, and Steel and class lectures will often be sufficient (except for those language
families we haven't covered yet). As always, make sure to properly cite any sources you use (if you
use your notes from lecture as a source for some specific information, please indicate this). Some
of the ideas in the article are also found in Guns, Germs, and Steel. So, if you want to reference
the book or the documentary, feel free to do so.
Given that you will need to summarize and expand aspects of Diamond and Bellwood's analyses
in order to do this assignment, as well as offer your own critique of them, I suspect a well-done
assignment will be around four pages in length.
Grading
Grades will be assessed on a 25 point total, and the following factors will be considered during
assessment:
1. Clear summary of Diamond and Bellwood's account of the history of language family you
choose to discuss
2. Clear evaluation of Diamond and Bellwood's claims about the family, in particular with
respect to how well it supports their overall hypothesis
3. Insightful integration of information you have learned from lecture, Guns, Germs, and Steel,
or outside sources into your discussion