Article published In:
Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity: Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris SwadeshEdited by Søren Wichmann and Anthony P. Grant
[Diachronica 27:2] 2010
► pp. 214–225
Edited by Søren Wichmann and Anthony P. Grant
[Diachronica 27:2] 2010
► pp. 214–225
Do languages originate and become extinct at constant rates?
The shape of phylogenetic trees of language families is used to test the null hypothesis that languages throughout a family originate and go extinct at constant rates. Trees constructed either by hand or by computer prove to be more unbalanced than predicted, with many languages on some branches and few on others. The observed levels of imbalance are not explainable by errors in the trees or by the population sizes or geographic density of the languages. The results suggest changes in rates of origination or extinction on a time scale shorter than the time depth of currently recognized families.
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Cited by four other publications
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Baker, Matthew J.
2021. Foundations of the Age-Area Hypothesis. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 8:1
Moran, S. & J. Prokic
2013. Investigating the relatedness of the endangered Dogon languages. Literary and Linguistic Computing 28:4 ► pp. 676 ff.
Greenhill, Simon J.
2011. Levenshtein Distances Fail to Identify Language Relationships Accurately. Computational Linguistics 37:4 ► pp. 689 ff.
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