What is the relationship between the spread of particular language and the spread of culture and technical knowledge?
Colin Renfrew proposes one of the hypotheses about how the language has been spread and developed throughout the history. His idea is based on the fact that language is spread with the migration of agricultural populations, which is also connected with the spread of culture and technical knowledge.
Considering Renfrew’s assumption it could be stated that different languages and the Indo-European group of languages, in particular, are the result of the spread of agricultural production that occurred 7500 years ago.
Talking about the territory of the contemporary Europe it could be said that almost entire population that used to live there spoke the Indo-European language. Such situation happened because of adopting of farming and necessity to migrate from one place to another, subsequently farming as well as culture and language spread on the larger territory which in the result covered the whole Europe.
As Renfrew stated, “this implies that the bulk of the population in each new area which comes to practice a farming economy is not of local ancestry” (104), which means that originally all groups and communities that lived on the Europe territory spoke the same language.It is also should be mentioned that with passing of centuries isolated communities start to form dialects and subsequently these dialects began to sound less similar to each other.
In addition, “Over a period of millennia, these would separate into distinct although cognate language” (105). The same could be said about forming of other language families, since as well as in the Europe in other parts of the world occur migrations which also caused the spread of language and …
