Martine Robbeets is leading the Archaeolinguistic Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena and teaching Transeurasian Linguistics as a Honorary Professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. In March 2021, she finalized an interdisciplinary research project on the dispersal of the Transeurasian languages, funded by the European Research Council. Previous affiliations include an Associate Professorship of Japanese Linguistics at Leiden University and visiting scholarships at the Universities of Tokyo, Leuven and Mainz. Her publications include “Is Japanese related to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic?” (2005, Harrassowitz), “Diachrony of Verb Morphology” (2015, de Gruyter Mouton) and various journal articles, book chapters and edited volumes.
The origins of the Japanese language are among the most disputed issues of historical linguistics. In this talk, I present evidence for Transeurasian affiliation, relating Japanese to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic languages. This classification gives rise to new questions with regard to the location of the original homeland, the dating and the early dispersals of Transeurasian languages, which I address through ‘triangulating’ genetics, archaeology and linguistics in a unified perspective. By combining evidence from the three disciplines, I show that the spread of Japanese to the Japanese Islands was driven by agriculture.
