Frieda Steurs, Secretary-General of CIPL, interviewed Martine Robbeets who is leading the Language and Anthropocene Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena. At the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz she teaches as an Honorary Professor at the Department of General and comparative Linguistics.
Would you please introduce yourself?
My name is Martine Robbeets. My family — that is a son, a husband and a cat— lives in Maaseik in Belgium, but professionally I am active in Germany: in Jena and Mainz. At the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, I am leading the Language and Anthropocene Research Group, and at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, I am teaching as an Honorary Professor at the Department of General and Comparative Linguistics. I hold a PhD in Comparative Linguistics from the University of Leiden and a Habilitation in Linguistic Typology from the University of Mainz.
How did your study track lead you to what you are doing right now?
To be honest, my first study was medicine, but in the second year I dropped out. My results were good, but the study was not my thing. My mother had a lace shop in Bruges where I went to work. There were many Japanese customers, which prompted me to study Japanese at the university in Leuven. I was really intrigued by how different the Japanese language was and how it came to be that way. During an Erasmus exchange at Leiden University, I met my future supervisor, Frits Kortlandt, an Indo-Europeanist with a broad vision. He encouraged me to take up a second master in Korean Studies in Leiden and to write a PhD in historical comparative linguistics. After my PhD, I conducted several postdoctoral research projects in Japan, Belgium and Germany on the Transeurasian origins of Japanese. When I finally received an ERC consolidator grant for an interdisciplinary project that integrated archeology and genetics with linguistics, things seemed to have come full circle. The knowledge gained during my medical studies finally came in handy again…
“Language and the Anthropocene” sounds very interesting and very mysterious at the same time. Can you explain to the readers what this is about?
Until last year my research group was called “Archaeolinguistics” because we bring together language and archaeology. However, with the re-orientation of the Max Planck Institute in Jena as “Geoanthropology”, our Founding Director Jürgen Renn decided to rename all departments in our new institute according to processes rather than disciplines. This inspired the name change of our group to “Language and the Anthropocene”. Archaeolinguistics is still our discipline but the processes we investigate are language dynamics in the Anthropocene.
The Anthropocene is a new way of looking at world history, one which highlights the relationship between humans and the earth system. It can be conceptualized as the period when human activity started to have a significant —even irreversible— impact on our planet’s climate and ecosystems. Anthropologists would date this relationship back to over ten thousand years ago to the development of farming. Archaeolinguistics and Anthropocene Studies thus share a similar time frame and archaeological signature. After all, the spread of farming triggered the dispersal of several major language families across the world.
Why the interest in areal linguistics, language contact, morphology, grammaticalization theory, interdisciplinary research and linguistic evolution?
There are no unique languages and yet all languages are unique. The interplay of universal principles and historical accidents in language development fascinates me. The most attractive thing about linguistics is that it helps you understand how languages became the way they are. The subfields you refer to are all about that. Inheritance and contact, genealogical linguistics and areal linguistics are not antonyms, they are compatible sides of the same coin. Genetics, archaeology and linguistics offer different perspectives but all on the same past. After all, there is only one human past.
On the website of Max Planck, I saw your interest in several languages: Turkic languages, Mongolic languages, Tungusic languages, Korean, Japanese, Ryukyuan languages, Ainu and Paleosiberian languages, languages of Europe and Asia in general. Can you comment on this?
The specific scientific question that has driven me since I was a student of Japanese Studies in the early nineties, is whether Japanese, the Ryukyuan languages, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic belong to the same language family. Together with my mentor Lars Johanson, a Turkologist from Mainz, I coined the name “Transeurasian” for this grouping, but it is also known as “Altaic”. The question whether these 5 families go back to one common ancestor is among the most debated issues in Historical Comparative Linguistics. My interest goes beyond genealogy into contact relations between these languages and neighboring languages in Eurasia such as Ainu, Nivkh and other Paleosiberian languages.
Can you describe some of your research projects?
Roughly speaking, my group’s research projects cover 3 themes: the connection between ecology and language, the linguistic prehistory of Transeurasian and neighboring languages, and language dynamics viewed from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Our first theme is the impact of environmental change, climate change in particular, on language dynamics in the Anthropocene. Human-induced climate change did not only reduce biological diversity, linguistic diversity, too, has over time been increasingly constrained by human impacts, some of which triggered by climate change and the spread of agriculture.
Our second interest lies with genealogical continuity and prehistorical contact of Transeurasian languages and their neighbours. The region of North and East Asia, which is at the core of our interest, also serves as an ideal test-case for the language-ecology relationship, not only because it is home to a variety of language families, but also because it is known for its versatile climate and changing landscapes since Neolithic times.
The third theme is the application of interdisciplinary methods to historical linguistics. The basic method that underlies our research is “Triangulation”, the strategic use of multiple disciplines, methods, datasets and researchers to address one common question. Taking linguistics as a vantage point, our goal is to bring different disciplines —palaeoclimatoloy, archaeology, anthropology, genetics— in dialogue to enhance the relevance, validity and credibility of our research findings.
What part of your research appeals to you most?
Big-picture approaches. Building on the shoulders of field-linguists, who meticulously collect data about their languages of specialization, bring their expertise together to draw comparative linguistic inferences, and map these in turn on different lines of genetic, archaeological and climatological evidence, gives me great satisfaction. It feels like bringing together some pieces of the big puzzle of human prehistory.
You gave a very interesting plenary lecture at ICL in Poznan. Can you summarize or give the readers an idea about the content?
My plenary lecture at ICL in Poznan explored how the interaction of humans with their natural environment may have impacted language dynamics over the last 10.000 years. It introduced the ways in which our natural environment can affect language structure, language diversity and language mobility. Drawing examples from various languages and language families worldwide, it concluded that the link between language dynamics and the natural environment is an indirect one going over humans, their basic body functions, mutual interactions, and strategies for survival. It also suggested that certain global climate trends, such as the Meghalayan drought known as the 4.4-kiloyear event, may have led to local linguistic responses, leading to more or less simultaneous break-ups of language families in different parts of the world.
Are you involved in any teaching, or guiding students in supervising master theses or PhD’s?
Over the last years, my teaching at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz has included MA courses, such as Origins and Structure of Japanese, Historical Comparative Linguistics, Archaeolinguistics and Transeurasian historical comparative linguistics. In the last Leiden University Summer School I taught Origins of Japanese as well as Distant Language Relationship. Recently, Rasmus Bjørn defended his PhD project “Eurasia connected: human prehistory through shared and innovated words for domesticated crops and animals” under my supervision and two upcoming defences are by Bingcong Deng on “A Stratigraphy of ancient lexical interaction between Sino-Tibetan and Transeurasian languages” and Martijn Knapen on “Prehistoric contact between Tungusic and Amuric”. Arda Duman has just started up a PhD project, titled “Palaeoclimate, Population Migrations and Language Dispersals in Northeast Asia During the Palaeoanthropocene”.
As an organisation that unites linguists from all over the world, what can CIPL do more to promote the linguistic discipline you are involved in? We send out newsletters, supply travel grants and support workshops.
I was truly impressed by the enormous audience that was attending my plenary lecture at ICL in Poznan. Thanks to the forum granted by CIPL, I was able to reach hundreds of linguists, all experts in a variety of linguistic subfields. For our group’s projects, CIPL’s greatest asset is in its broad outreach. Its newsletter can also help in spreading our research to colleagues and interested experts across the world. CIPL might also help by providing travel grants for attending workshops, especially to junior researchers that do not have their own funds and support the workshops we intend to organize, not necessarily financially but nominally so that the results can reach a wider public.
More information:
Please check the publication list of our “Language and the Anthropocene” group. One publication that is particularly eye-catching is our 2021 Nature paper, highlighted in bold. Not only did it reach a breakthrough by combining genetics, archaeology and language, but it also caused a true media storm. Hundreds of newspapers, journals and magazines covered our results. See this publication list here.
