Talk:Father tongue hypothesis

@Exceptions: The most curious thing about this article is the fact that at least one of the exceptions isn't an exception. Balti might perhaps be "among the most conservative dialects of Tibetan", an idea that actually goes back to the Hungarian scholar Ligeti, and has been propagated with more details by Roland Bielmeier, although this 'conservatism' only holds for phonology, and not at all for morphology. However "most conservative" does not necessarily mean that the language was originally spoken in this area or spoken there for the longest time. As is well known, speakers in colonialised areas and in the periphery may preserve archaic features longer than speakers at the political centre. There is absolutely no proof that a Tibetan dialect (or language) was spoken in Baltistan before the 7th c. CE. As most people acquainted with Tibetan history know, the western areas were conquered only by the late 7th or early 8th century CE, but they were never fully integrated into the Tibetan 'state'. There was thus also no compulsion to switch to Tibetan. However the Old Tibetan became an administrative and military lingua franca throughout the Tibetan empire, and it seems that some of the politically or economically opportunistic 'fathers' switched to Tibetan, first as L2, later as L1, so that Balti is, in fact, as the Baltis themselves claim, a "father tongue" or phaskat.

Bruguma~enwiki (talk) 22:19, 30 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Um, it's completely irrelevant what languages were spoken in the region before the 7th century, because the Y-chromosomal influx in question happened only with the introduction of Islam from the 15th century on! This is long after the Old Tibetan period and the Tibetan Empire. The fact remains that in the relevant context, which is the modern era and not the 7th century, the Balti language is genetically connected to the maternal, indigenous Tibetan line and not the paternal, externally introgressed line, and thus forms an obvious counterexample to the usual pattern. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 14:13, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Linguistics in the Digital Age
— Assignment last updated by Fedfed2 (talk) 00:53, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

Hungarian an exception?
How is Hungarian an exception? The Father Tongue hypothesis claims language is more correlated with paternal ancestry than with maternal. Unless you can show the Hungarian language was somehow more female mediated (I'm not aware of any mtDNA differences to the neighbouring populations, while Y-N is present at small frequencies), they are not an exception, just simply a population with little ancestry from the one that brought the language. 2A01:36D:118:6065:AB99:9586:48E3:591 (talk) 13:30, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

Examples from historic times
Is there literature that compares examples like the spread of the Arab language after/during the Islamic conquests, the spread of the Spanish language to the Americas and so on to how languages may or may not have spread in prehistory?

Also: languages have historically been spread while leaving virtually no genetic trace — for example English in India, French in sub-Saharan Africa or various Creole languages. Or are we overlooking the genetic component in those cases due to hypodescent making the European ancestry "disappear" in European perception? 2001:A62:1487:D302:4CE8:A2CC:ACB2:2E38 (talk) 21:18, 15 April 2024 (UTC)