Søren Wichmann
Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, LeipzigPhone: +49 341 3550-310
Email: wichmann@eva.mpg.de
Sandra Jacob
Press and Public Relations
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, LeipzigPhone: +49 341 3550-122
Fax: +49 341 3550-119
Email: jacob@eva.mpg.de
Cultural Studies . Linguistics
Dating the world’s language families
December 02, 2011
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The new method, building on an earlier approach known as glottochronology, calculates dates for parent languages of all of the world’s language families including such groups as Indo-European, Austronesian, and Mayan. It is based on the observation that the greater the linguistic differentiation within a family, the greater the period of time required for that differentiation to accrue. By quantifying vocabulary differences across languages of a family, the date at which a family’s parent language was most recently spoken is determined
The database used, compiled over several years by the ASJP consortium, is of unprecedented size, covering over half of the world’s more than 6000 languages. “ASJP dates facilitate connecting languages of the remote past with events revealed through archaeology, thus enhancing the study of prehistoric peoples”, says Søren Wichmann, a researcher at the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology.
The following institutions contributed to this study: University of California, Los Angeles; Northern Illinois University; University of West Florida; Leiden University; Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Leipzig University; Justus Liebig University Gießen; Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen; University of Amsterdam; University of Lancaster; Moscow State University; Arizona State University; Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf; Kazan State University.
