The ancestry of the Chinese people based on language and genes

Diachronica, 1997

Reviewed by PAUL SlDWELL & ZHOU XlAOKANG, University of Melbourne* * We would like to thank Neile Kirk of Melbourne University for helpful advice and com ments in the preparation of this review.

The present book entitled Languages and Genes in Northwestern China and Adjacent Regions consists of an investigation of language contact, focused on Northwestern China. What is new in the book is that the research is not limited to a linguistic perspective but is extended to an interdisciplinary approach, exploiting research results from different domains. This work comes from a collaboration between two different teams (French and Chinese) composed of linguists and geneticists who worked together for nearly four years. The book takes a novel, interdisciplinary approach, joining linguistic, biological, historical and archeological disciplines. This type of book is currently uncommon, but specialists and lay-readers alike are now aware of the significance of such work. There are numerous books dealing with linguistics or biology separately, but there are few books in which linguists and geneticists work together targeting the same languages and the same populations. This book mainly deals with people and languages in Northwestern China. This region has drawn attention from anthropologists, archaeologists and linguists for several centuries. Over the past several decades, linguists and other human science researchers have combined their efforts to better understand the social, anthropological, and linguistic phenomena in this region, but few investigations seem to take advantage of the recent results from natural sciences such as biology. Many articles in the present work try to combine human science and natural science’s approaches to reconsider the diversity of languages in this area based on the results of recent linguistic and genetic research.

pp. 43-58, Vol. 2 in Peter Bellwood and Ian Lilley, eds., Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association Bulletin, 18 (The Melaka Papers). Canberra: Australian National University., 1999

The first four sections of this paper provide an abridged historical synopsis of the main developments in linguistic thinking about the genetic relationships of Chinese and other languages of eastern Eurasia. The fifth and last section relates recent insights in Tibeto-Burman phylogeny to the discoveries of archaeologists in China and neighbouring countries. The dispersal of Neolithic cultural complexes is shown to correspond to the present-day distribution of Tibeto-Burman language communities when viewed in light of the new informed phylogeny.

American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2018

Objectives: The Jing people are a recognized ethnic group in Guangxi, southwest China, who are the immigrants from Vietnam during the 16th century. They speak Vietnamese but with lots of language borrowings from Cantonese, Zhuang, and Mandarin. However, it's unclear if there is large-scale gene flow from surrounding populations into Jing people during their language change due to the very limited genetic information of this population. Materials and Methods: We collected blood samples from 37 Jing and 3 Han Chinese individuals from Wanwei, Shanxin, and Wutou islands in Guangxi and genotyped about 600,000 genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). We used Principal Component Analysis (PCA), ADMIXTURE analysis, f statistics, qpWave and qpAdm to infer the population genetic structure and admixture. Results: Our data revealed that the Jing people are genetically similar to the populations in southwest China and mainland Southeast Asia. But compared with Vietnamese, they show significant evidence of gene flow from surrounding East Asians. The admixture proportion is estimated to be around 35-42% in different Jing groups using southern Han Chinese as a proxy. The majority of the paternal lineages of Jing people are most likely from surrounding East Asians. Discussion: We conclude that the formation and language change of present-day Jing people have involved genetic assimilation of surrounding East Asian populations. The language borrowing, in this case, is not only a cultural phenomenon but has involved demic diffusion.

Linguistics and genetics always reach similar results in phylogenetic studies of human populations. A previous study found that populations speaking Han Chinese dialects have closer genetic relationships to each other than to neighboring ethnic groups. However, the Pinghua Chinese population from Guangxi is an exception. We have reported that northern Pinghua people are genetically related to populations speaking Daic languages. In this study, we further studied the southern Pinghua population. The Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA haplogroup components and network analysis indicated that northern and southern Pinghua populations were genetically different. Therefore, we concluded that the Pinghua speakers may have various origins, even though Pinghua dialects are similar. Pinghua dialects might have originated when the Daic or Hmongic speakers from different regions learnt to speak the same Chinese dialect hundreds of years ago. Speakers of one language do not always have just one origin.

This is an introductory essay of Chinese cultural history, and it is written for people whose first language is not Chinese. Chinese, as used here, refers to cultural rather than ethnical characteristics. By this definition, the shape and capacity of the Chinese mind do not include a biological inheritance. To understand the Chinese mind, one has to speak, read, and to understand the tone, rhythm, imagery, and gestures of the language and see the world through the Chinese imagination which is expressed in a diverse multi-media spectrum, crowded with images and connotations that have accumulated and refined for over five thousand years.

This is an introductory essay of Chinese cultural history, and it is written for people whose first language is not Chinese. Chinese, as used here, refers to cultural rather than ethnical characteristics. By this definition, the shape and capacity of the Chinese mind do not include a biological inheritance. To understand the Chinese mind, one has to speak, read, and to understand the tone, rhythm, imagery, and gestures of the language and see the world through the Chinese imagination which is expressed in a diverse multi-media spectrum, crowded with images and connotations that have accumulated and refined for over five thousand years.

Human Biology, 2012

Diachronica, 2007

Reviewed by J. Marshall Unger (The Ohio State University) This collection of papers "arose out of a workshop on the phylogeny of East Asian languages, organized by Laurent Sagart and the much missed Stanley Starosta in Périgueux … 29-3 August 200" (xxi). It comprises a useful introduction by the editors, four contributions on archaeology, seven on linguistics, and six on genetics and physical anthropology. The focus is on languages usually classified as Sino-Tibetan, Hmong-Mien, Daic, Austro-Asiatic, and Austronesian and their speakers, past and present. The so-called Altaic languages, Korean, Japanese, Ainu, and isolates of China do not, unfortunately, figure in the linguistics chapters, but there is no shortage of material on high-level theories and macrophyla. The book will therefore be of interest not only to scholars specializing on East Asia and the Pacific but also to those concerned with theoretical aspects of the comparative method and the challenges of interdisciplinary inquiry in general.