Tracking human migration through language contact: A case study based on the Chadic family
The purpose of this project is to develop methodological linguistic tools for studying paths of human migration. In the proposed project, language is a conceived as consisting of a lexicon and a grammatical system involving syntax, morphology, and phonology, all of which are used to code grammatical meanings in the language. A grammatical innovation is a grammatical meaning that exists in the modern language but was not found in the parent language. The proposed methodology involves (a) discovering which innovations are language-internal and which result from contact with other languages, (b) identifying the language(s) that triggered the contact-induced innovations, and (c) proposing a path of migration based on the nature and sequence of the contact-induced innovations. The methodology is itself an innovation in the field of linguistics.