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 …

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 …

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 …

One of the major benefits of interdisciplinary research is the chance to swap tools between
fields, to save having to reinvent the wheel. The fields of language evolution and …

Subgrouping language varieties within dialect continua poses challenges for the application
of the comparative method of historical linguistics, and similar claims have been made for …

This volume seeks to infer large phylogenetic networks from phonetically encoded lexical
data and contribute in this way to the historical study of language varieties. The technical …

Comparisons between languages can illuminate the processes of language change, by
revealing meaningful associations between language features, or the influence of external …

Recent applications of phylogenetic methods to historical linguistics have been criticized for
assuming a tree structure in which ancestral languages differentiate and split up into …

The chapter discusses recently developed computational techniques providing concrete
help in addressing various tasks in historical language comparison, focusing specifically on …

Approaches to linguistic areas have largely focused either on purely qualitative investigation
of area-formation processes, on quantitative and qualitative exploration of synchronic …