While language contact has so far been predominantly studied on the basis of detailed case
studies, the emergence of methods for phylogenetic reconstruction and automated word …

It has been observed that borrowing within a group of genetically related languages often
causes the lexical similarities among them to be skewed. Consequently, it has been …

Phylogenetic trees are a central tool for studying language evolution and have wide
implications for understanding cultural evolution as a whole. For example, they have been …

One of the major issues in historical and contact linguistics is how to distinguish between
inherited and acquired vocabulary in a given language: both traditional historical linguistics …

Although lexical borrowing is an important aspect of language evolution, there have been
few attempts to automate the identification of borrowings in lexical datasets. Moreover, none …

The genealogical paradigm, classically formulated by Meillet, still dominates language
classification. Despite of its weaknesses, the tree model is at the base of all global or …

Lexical borrowing, the transfer of words from one language to another, is one of the most
frequent processes in language evolution. In order to detect borrowings, linguists make use …

Over the past two decades, many of the major controversies in historical linguistics have
centred on language classification. Some of these controversies have been concentrated …

Historical relationships among languages are used as a proxy for social history in many non-
linguistic settings, including the fields of cultural and molecular anthropology. Linguists have …

Language evolution is traditionally described in terms of family trees with ancestral
languages splitting into descendent languages. However, it has long been recognized that …