Homelands of the world’s language families: a quantitative approach

Søren Wichmann ^[1] ; André Müller ^[1] ; Viveka Velupillai ^[2]
1. [1] Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
  
  Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
  
  Kreisfreie Stadt Leipzig, Alemania
2. [2] University of Giessen
  
  University of Giessen
  
  Distrito de Gießen, Alemania
Localización: Diachronica: International Journal for Historical Linguistics = Revue Internationale pour la Linguistique Historique = Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Sprachwissenschaft, ISSN 0176-4225, Vol. 27, Nº Extra 2, 2010 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Quantitative Approaches to Linguistic Diversity Commemorating the centenary of the birth of Morris Swadesh ), págs. 247-276
Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
- A systematic, computer-automated tool for narrowing down the homelands of linguistic families is presented and applied to 82 of the world’s larger families. The approach is inspired by the well-known idea that the geographical area of maximal diversity within a language family corresponds to the original homeland. This is implemented in an algorithm which takes a lexicostatistically derived distance measure and a geographical distance measure and computes a lexical diversity measure for each language in the family relative to all the other related languages. The location of the language with the highest diversity measure is heuristically identified with the homeland.