The vocabulary of cereal cultivation and the phylogeny of East Asian languages.

International audienceThis study investigates some important terms of cereal agriculture in the five languagefamilies of East Asia, in an attempt to gain some insights into processes of cereal domestication, demographic expansions and the formation of language families. The principal findings are:• There is some evidence that the proto-Austronesians cultivated wet rice, albeit without elaborate irrigation techniques;• Two words for rice are uniquely shared by Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian, with sound correspondences;• A word for ‘Setaria italica', a millet, is possibly shared by Chinese and Austronesian.• There is no evidence for agricultural words uniquely shared by Austroasiatic and Austronesian (Austric)