Abstract This paper presents a methodology for quantifying diversity within a group of related languages and correlating the patterns found with known historical developments, as a way of testing a variety of hypotheses, regarding subclassification, reconstruction, the influence of language contact, the relative consistency of the speed of language change, etc. The methodology is applied to Arabic dialects, for which there is a wealth of synchronic variation as well as considerable historical documentation on both linguistic and migration history. The goal is to establish a more solid empirical basis for inferring diachronic conclusions based on comparative analysis of synchronic data.

Abstract The availability of large diachronic corpora has provided the impetus for a growing body of quantitative research on language evolution and meaning change. The central quantities in this research are token frequencies of linguistic elements in texts, with changes in frequency taken to reflect the popularity or selective fitness of an element. However, corpus frequencies may change for a wide variety of reasons, including purely random sampling effects, or because corpora are composed of contemporary media and fiction texts within which the underlying topics ebb and flow with cultural and socio-political trends. In this work, we introduce a simple model for controlling for topical fluctuations in corpora—the topical-cultural advection model—and demonstrate how it provides a robust baseline of variability in word frequency changes over time. We validate the model on a diachronic corpus spanning two centuries, and a carefully-controlled artificial language change scenario, and then use it to correct for topical fluctuations in historical time series. Finally, we use the model to show that the emergence of new words typically corresponds with the rise of a trending topic. This suggests that some lexical innovations occur due to growing communicative need in a subspace of the lexicon, and that the topical-cultural advection model can be used to quantify this.

Abstract This paper discusses the impact of linguistic contact on the make-up of consonantal inventories of the languages of Eurasia. New measures for studying the importance of language contact for the development of phonological inventories are proposed, and two empirical studies are reported. First, using two different measures of dissimilarity of phonemic inventories (the Jaccard dissimilarity measure and the novel Closest-Relative Cumulative Jaccard Dissimilarity measure), it is demonstrated that language contact—operationalized as languages being connected by an edge in a neighbor network—makes a significant contribution to between-inventory differences when phylogenetic variables are controlled for. Second, a novel measure of the exposure of a language to a particular segment—the Neighbor-Pressure Metric (NPM)—is proposed as a means of quantifying language contact with respect to phonological inventories. It is shown that addition of NPM helps achieve higher prediction accuracy than using bare phylogenetic data and that distributions of different consonants display a different degree of dependence on language-contact processes. Finally, more complex models for predicting consonant inventories are briefly explored, demonstrating the presence of complex non-linear relationships between inventories of neighboring languages.

We have documented language varieties (either Turkic or Indo-European) spoken in 23 test sites by 88 informants belonging to the major ethnic groups of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan (Karakalpaks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Yaghnobis). The recorded linguistic material concerns 176 words of the extended Swadesh list and will be made publically available with the publication of this paper. Phonological diversity is measured by the Levenshtein distance and displayed as a consensus bootstrap tree and as multidimensional scaling plots. Linguistic contact is measured as the number of borrowings, from one linguistic family into the other, according to a precision/recall analysis further validated by expert judgment. Concerning Turkic languages, the results of our sample do not support Kazakh and Karakalpak as distinct languages and indicate the existence of several separate Karakalpak varieties. Kyrgyz and Uzbek, on the other hand, appear quite homogeneous. Among the Indo-Iranian languages, the distinction between Tajik and Yaghnobi varieties is very clear-cut. More generally, the degree of borrowing is higher than average where language families are in contact in one of the many sorts of situations characterizing Central Asia: frequent bilingualism, shifting political boundaries, ethnic groups living outside the “mother” country.

The Viking Hypothesis neglects (i) the significant degree of stability from Old to Middle (and even Modern) English grammar and (ii) parallel, but independent, developments not induced by North Germanic in the grammars of continental West Germanic dialects.

The conclusion seems inescapable, if the facts in Emonds & Faarlund are more or less right: Middle English would be the outcome of a shift from West Germanic grammar to an eccentric form of North Germanic grammar.