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Investigating demic versus cultural diffusion and sex bias in the spread of Austronesian languages in Vietnam - PubMed

  • ️Mon Jan 01 2024

Investigating demic versus cultural diffusion and sex bias in the spread of Austronesian languages in Vietnam

Dinh Huong Thao et al. PLoS One. 2024.

Abstract

Austronesian (AN) is the second-largest language family in the world, particularly widespread in Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) and Oceania. In Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA), groups speaking these languages are concentrated in the highlands of Vietnam. However, our knowledge of the spread of AN-speaking populations in MSEA remains limited; in particular, it is not clear if AN languages were spread by demic or cultural diffusion. In this study, we present and analyze new data consisting of complete mitogenomes from 369 individuals and 847 Y-chromosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from 170 individuals from all five Vietnamese Austronesian groups (VN-AN) and five neighboring Vietnamese Austroasiatic groups (VN-AA). We found genetic signals consistent with matrilocality in some, but not all, of the VN-AN groups. Population affinity analyses indicated connections between the AN-speaking Giarai and certain Taiwanese AN groups (Rukai, Paiwan, and Bunun). However, overall, there were closer genetic affinities between VN-AN groups and neighboring VN-AA groups, suggesting language shifts. Our study provides insights into the genetic structure of AN-speaking communities in MSEA, characterized by some contact with Taiwan and language shift in neighboring groups, indicating that the expansion of AN speakers in MSEA was a combination of cultural and demic diffusion.

Copyright: © 2024 Thao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Geographical map displaying sampling locations.

Triangles mark the sampling sites of all MSEA and ISEA populations included in the analysis. In the inset, crosses and circles mark the sampling locations of the 10 new and 17 previously published Vietnamese populations, respectively. For the Vietnamese populations, labels are color-coded by language family, as indicated in the legend. All the populations outside of Vietnam included here speak AN languages, and their locations are color-coded by mtDNA and MSY. The comparative populations for mtDNA and MSY analyses are numbered according to S1 and S4 Tables, respectively. The map was generated with QuantumGIS (Version 3.34), Opensource Geospatial Foundation (

https://www.qgis.org/

), and country administrative boundaries that were downloaded from

https://www.diva-gis.org/

.

Fig 2
Fig 2. Genetic diversity indices shown as the percent difference from the mean.

(A) Haplotype diversity. (B) Nucleotide diversity. Crosses and dots represent MSY and mtDNA data, respectively. Population labels are color-coded by language family, with Austroasiatic in purple, Austronesian in red, Tai-Kadai in yellow, Hmong-Mien in black, and Sino-Tibetan in green. The gray line indicates the mean across populations.

Fig 3
Fig 3. mtDNA haplotype sharing between Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese AN populations.

mtDNA shared haplotype frequencies are represented by the blue gradient. Population labels are color-coded by language family with Austroasiatic in purple, Vietnamese Austronesian in red, Thai Austronesian in olive drab, Tai-Kadai in yellow, Hmong-Mien in black, Sino-Tibetan in lime, Cambodian Austronesian in pink, Taiwanese Austronesian in blue, Philippine Austronesian in brown, Indonesian Austronesian in orange, and Malaysian Austronesian in turquoise.

Fig 4
Fig 4. Correspondence analysis plot based on haplogroup frequencies of Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese populations.

(A) mtDNA. (B, C) MSY, with the plot on the right (C) zooming in on the region indicated by the dashed rectangle in the full plot (B). Population labels are color-coded by language family with Austroasiatic in purple, Vietnamese Austronesian in red, Tai-Kadai in yellow, Hmong-Mien in black, Sino-Tibetan in lime, Cambodian Austronesian (Cham-CB-Bat and Cham-CB-Kam) in pink, Thai Austronesian in olive drab, Taiwanese Austronesian in blue, Philippine Austronesian in brown, Indonesian Austronesian in orange, and Malaysian Austronesian in turquoise. Haplogroup labels are in gray.

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Grants and funding

This research was funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Vietnam (ĐTĐL.CN.60/19).