On South Asian ancient languages, the high degree of preservation of Vedic Sanskrit is useful. There is some interesting stuff regarding "Language X" for instance.

"did the ancestral South Indians speak Dravidian languages?" I doubt it,

Right: because current thought is that the Dravidian speakers started in the northwest, Indus region; and that the Aryan-speaking invaders pushed them into South India. (Except for the Brahui.) Before that, the Indus developed independently of South India [South India; by Paul Harding, Patrick Horton, Amy Karafin; p. 34; citing, India: A History by John Keay]

After that, over millennia, the Dravidians would have got the South Indians to speak their language.

I get the impression from a reference to cattle-herding that South India wasn't heavily populated before the Dravidians showed up.

Anyway, I'd check the loanwords in non-Brahui Dravidian (Sangam literature), and earliest Prakrit as well, for non-Dravidian elements. I expect Sanskrit to be more archaising and so to be more of a "north" language, with few borrowings outside Dravidian.

Right: because current thought is that the Dravidian speakers started in the northwest, Indus region;

can you think of languages being "pushed" like this? it seems that mostly languages which are being overwhelmed survive as isolates, like brahui, as opposed to be simply shifting. or, they were already extant in other areas (e.g., celtic) before being absorbed.

the vietnamese are the only ones i can think of off the topic of my head.

I don't know a lot about it, but I thought some of the other languages families of southeast Asian, like Tai and possibly Hmong, are also examples of languages being pushed out of southeastern China by the Chinese, not just Vietnames. Another example is the spread of Brythonic languages to northern France and Spain. That's getting to be a fairly small scale, though; we could probably find a bunch more examples on an even smaller scale, such as the movement of Kalmyk (a Mongolic language) speakers to eastern Europe.

The Mfecane in southern Africa probably resulted in some languages being pushed ahead of the Zulus, although the details are obscure to me. There are also various examples of North American Indian groups getting pushed out of one area and then thriving in a new area during the chaos of gradual white domination. The Sioux settlement of the great plains definitely owed a lot to technology, but I think it also had something to do with them getting beat up in the old homeland.

People tend to marry those who they can communicate with.

Was the guy who theorized that married?

The Bretons are from Britain, not survivors of the Gauls. I believe that several peoples were pushed to the Caucasus -- Ossette used to be a steppe language, and I think Kabardian / Circassian.

I've speculated about the possibility that languages might have alternated complexification and simplification (creolization) in such a way that at some point in the not too distanmt past, say 10,000 BC, none of the spoken languages would have had any evident relationship with any language spoken today. Not that they were deeply strange and different, just that no family resemblances would be detectable.

One of the Paleo-Siberian languages, Nivk/Gilyat, is very complicated and is apparently getting more so. It's only spoken by about a thousand native speakers. I've wondered whether the complexification is enabled it by being strictly a native-speaker language; there's no reason for anyone else to learn the language (except linguists) so there's no drive for simplification.

In New Guinea language change can be deliberate and political. A group might decide to transform its language in a certain almost pig latinish way to preserve uniqueness. This increases language diversity and also the pace of evolution. I believe that the motives are in the area of sorcery. In any case separateness is a goal, not a side effect.

The thread accepts the 'aryan invasion theory', which appears rather faded/discredited now. An alternate discourse is becomming more loud.

There is also a view that Brahui speakers were decendents of early 'Tamil' invaders to the north.

Nivkh / Gilyak. Sorry.

I should specify that by "complex" I mean "full of arbitrary rules to memorize". Creolized languages have been stripped of these arbitrarinesses, but when they become native languages they can develop new ones.

The thread accepts the 'aryan invasion theory', which appears rather faded/discredited now. An alternate discourse is becomming more loud.

no it's not. it's loud in india and among hindutva ideologues. no one outside of india thinks that the indo-europeans were anything but exogenous (perhaps aside from a few neo-theosophists who will also talk to you about the atlanteans). that's a fact. you might label it a anti-indian conspiracy or some bizarre random act of intellectual capriciousness, but that's what it is. whether you want to call it an "invasion" is another thing altogether. indo-european languages originated outside of india. logic as i understand that entails that the aryans arrived from outside since the aryans are presumably indo-european.

(you can also claim that arabic spread from morocco to the east if you want, there's no law against it, but that's a false statement)

Just in case you don't know it, Graham Robb's
"The Discovery of France" is revealing on the patchwork of languages and dialects in France well into the 19th, and even 20th, century. It's a cracking read.

Point taken, but the differences between north indians & south indians is striking. It is surprising that Genetically there is no much difference.( as per the cited study)

Hope you can throw some light for a non biological observer.

I'm confused. I thought the North Indian - South Indian division discussed in this paper was much, much older than the Dravidian / Aryan cultural division (IIRC Vedic people are thought to have arrived c. 1500 BC)?

I'm confused. I thought the North Indian - South Indian division discussed in this paper was much, much older than the Dravidian / Aryan cultural division (IIRC Vedic people are thought to have arrived c. 1500 BC)?

yes, i think so too. but read supplemental 1, and there's some confusion here. i for example have said several times that i don't think ANI is "aryan" or recent. the frequency in south indian tribal populations is way too high (i.e., a low bound of 40%).

Point taken, but the differences between north indians & south indians is striking.

in what dimension?

So there is genetic evidence of a very old ANI invasion, and cultural evidence of a more recent (Vedic) Aryan migration.

But no evidence of a ANI (cultural) migration, or of an Aryan (genetic) invasion.

Research is making South Asian history more muddled, not less.

i think there is genetic evidence of an aryan invasion, but i think it is the minor component. look at the frequencies of lactase persistence alleles in north india, and they're clearly the haplotypes of northwest eurasia and central eurasia. but this is probably *overestimate* of said ancestry, because positive selection would increase the frequency.

also, i think there's a lot of non-aryan exogenous influence in south asia, even preceding the reinvention of writing stimulated by the impact of syraic phonetic scripts in the 1st millenium. the emerge of puranic hinduism is general sketched out as the synthesis, perhaps even reassertion of the dominance of, non-vedic religious ideas vis-a-vis aryan vedic concepts (shramanic movements are also sometimes bracketed into the former).