An interesting special issue of the journal Language Evolution has appeared, dedicated to Ancient DNA and language evolution.
Also, check out the preprint at BioRxiv, Geospatial distributions reflect rates of evolution of features of language, by Kauhanen et al. (2018).
Abstract:
Different structural features of human language change at different rates and thus exhibit different temporal stabilities. Existing methods of linguistic stability estimation depend upon the prior genealogical classification of the world’s languages into language families; these methods result in unreliable stability estimates for features which are sensitive to horizontal transfer between families and whenever data are aggregated from families of divergent time depths. To overcome these problems, we describe a method of stability estimation without family classifications, based on mathematical modelling and the analysis of contemporary geospatial distributions of linguistic features. Regressing the estimates produced by our model against those of a genealogical method, we report broad agreement but also important differences. In particular, we show that our approach is not liable to some of the false positives and false negatives incurred by the genealogical method. Our results suggest that the historical evolution of a linguistic feature leaves a footprint in its global geospatial distribution, and that rates of evolution can be recovered from these distributions by treating language dynamics as a spatially extended stochastic process.
Featured image, modified from the paper: “Empirical geospatial distributions of two linguistic features on the hemisphere from 30°Wto 150° E (red: feature present, blue: feature absent): (A) definite marker (WALS feature 37A), (B) object–verb order (WALS feature 83A). Shown are both individual empirical data points (languages, as given by WALS coordinates) and a spatial interpolation (inverse distance weighting) on these points. Map projection: Albers equal-area.”
See also:
- On the origin of language and human evolution
- Evolutionary forces in language change depend on selective pressure, but also on random chance
- Forces driving grammatical change are different to those driving lexical change
- The myth of mixed language, the concepts of culture core and package, and the invention of ‘Steppe folk’
