30.05.23 - Lindell Bromham

The development of global language databases and the adoption of statistical methods from evolutionary biology allow new ways to ask long-standing questions about the pace and mechanism of language change over time. I will illustrate some of these new directions through a number of interdisciplinary collaborations between evolutionary biologists and linguists. In combination, these projects allow exploration of the hypothesis that small, isolated populations accrue language complexity, while languages from large populations with a high degree of language contact tend to become more simplified.  In particular, I will discuss the importance of taking spatial proximity and relatedness of languages into account when testing hypotheses about the origins and maintenance of linguistic diversity.