The Language Family as a Field for Historical Reconstruction

Distributional data within a family of contemporary languages can serve to reconstruct characteristics of the culture of its proto-speech community and of intermediate mesolanguages. Much depends on methodological rigor. Hence the most secure reconstructions are based on lexical reconstruction. Less secure, but still valuable reconstructions can be made from the distribution of nonlinguistic kinds of data (e.g., rules of descent). In either case the focus of reconstruction is clearer than for areal reconstructions cross-cutting language families. Athapaskan serves as the principal example of the application of the proposed methods.