Essfors, H. N. H. (2026). Phylogeny as a proxy for structural linguistic diversity: a reasonable approach? In The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference (EVOLANG XVI) (pp. 118–125). The Evolution of Language Conferences.
In this paper, the possibility of using phylogenetic relatedness as a proxy for linguistic similarity in the context of structural linguistic diversity is explored. The cross-linguistic databases Grambank, ASJP, and PHOIBLE are assessed on their suitability for deriving such measures in the context of global linguistic diversity. After intersecting the databases, measures of linguistic similarity and tree-topology similarity are derived between all pairs of languages and correlated. The results suggest a weak to moderate association between linguistic similarity measures and tree-topology similarity, concluding that phylogeny is a limited proxy and that large-scale studies of linguistic diversity should model structural dimensions separately.
en
Project title:
Disentangling effects of digitization on linguistic diversity: ICT23-012 (WWTF Wiener Wissenschafts-, Forschu und Technologiefonds)
