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Science 23 September 2005:
Vol. 309. no. 5743, pp. 2072 - 2075
DOI: 10.1126/science.1114615
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Reports

Structural Phylogenetics and the Reconstruction of Ancient Language History

Michael Dunn,1* Angela Terrill,1,2 Ger Reesink,1,2 Robert A. Foley,3 Stephen C. Levinson1,2

The contribution of language history to the study of the early dispersals of modern humans throughout the Old World has been limited by the shallow time depth (about 8000 ± 2000 years) of current linguistic methods. Here it is shown that the application of biological cladistic methods, not to vocabulary (as has been previously tried) but to language structure (sound systems and grammar), may extend the time depths at which language data can be used. The method was tested against well-understood families of Oceanic Austronesian languages, then applied to the Papuan languages of Island Melanesia, a group of hitherto unrelatable isolates. Papuan languages show an archipelago-based phylogenetic signal that is consistent with the current geographical distribution of languages. The most plausible hypothesis to explain this result is the divergence of the Papuan languages from a common ancestral stock, as part of late Pleistocene dispersals.

1 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Post Office Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, Netherlands.
2 Center for Language Studies, Radboud University, Post Office Box 9102, 6500 HC Nijmegen, Netherlands.
3 Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: michael.dunn{at}mpi.nl

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Progress in Dialectometry: Toward Explanation.
J. Nerbonne and W. Kretzschmar Jr (2006)
Lit Linguist Computing 21, 387-397
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Unexpected NRY Chromosome Variation in Northern Island Melanesia.
L. Scheinfeldt, F. Friedlaender, J. Friedlaender, K. Latham, G. Koki, T. Karafet, M. Hammer, and J. Lorenz (2006)
Mol. Biol. Evol. 23, 1628-1641
   Abstract »    Full Text »    PDF »


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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)