Language follows a distinct mode of extra-genomic evolution

B Bickel, AL Giraud, K Zuberbühler, CP Van Schaik - Physics of life reviews, 2024 - Elsevier
As one of the most specific, yet most diverse of human behaviors, language is shaped by
both genomic and extra-genomic evolution. Sharing methods and models between these …

The uses and abuses of tree thinking in cultural evolution

CL Evans, SJ Greenhill, J Watts… - … of the Royal …, 2021 - royalsocietypublishing.org
Modern phylogenetic methods are increasingly being used to address questions about
macro-level patterns in cultural evolution. These methods can illuminate the unobservable …

Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages

P Heggarty, C Anderson, M Scarborough, B King… - Science, 2023 - science.org
The origins of the Indo-European language family are hotly disputed. Bayesian phylogenetic
analyses of core vocabulary have produced conflicting results, with some supporting a …

Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss

H Skirgård, HJ Haynie, DE Blasi, H Hammarström… - Science …, 2023 - science.org
While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the
diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here, we outline the …

Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan

L Sagart, G Jacques, Y Lai, RJ Ryder… - Proceedings of the …, 2019 - National Acad Sciences
The Sino-Tibetan language family is one of the world's largest and most prominent families,
spoken by nearly 1.4 billion people. Despite the importance of the Sino-Tibetan languages …

Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, advancing data sharing and re-use in comparative linguistics

R Forkel, JM List, SJ Greenhill, C Rzymski, S Bank… - Scientific data, 2018 - nature.com
The amount of available digital data for the languages of the world is constantly increasing.
Unfortunately, most of the digital data are provided in a large variety of formats and therefore …