Claire Bowern

Yale University | YU · Department of Linguistics

This volume comprises a selection of papers that were presented at the 24th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL24), which took place at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra from 1-5 July, 2019. The volume’s aim is to reflect the breadth of research presented at the conference, with each chapter representative of...

Globally, human house types are diverse, varying in shape, size, roof type, building materials, arrangement, decoration, and many other features. Here we offer the first rigorous, global evaluation of the factors that influence the construction of traditional (vernacular) houses. We apply macroecological approaches to analyze data describing house...

The Oxford Guide to Australian languages is a wide-ranging reference work that provides information about the more than 550 traditional and new Indigenous languages of Australia. There are chapters covering phonology, morphology, and syntax; language change, typology, and language classification, and language in the social sphere, including socioli...

For a single species, human kinship organization is both remarkably diverse and strikingly organized. Kinship terminology is the structured vocabulary used to classify, refer to, and address relatives and family. Diversity in kinship terminology has been analyzed by anthropologists for over 150 years, although recurrent patterning across cultures r...

The study of language variation and change is both one of the oldest areas of the scientific study of language, and one of the most global. Its origins (in European traditions) are steeped in Empire and colonialism. Yet it is also an important way to study relationships and dynamics between language and society. It also contributes crucial insights...

While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here, we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank...

Aim Land ownership norms are well documented and play a central role in social–ecological systems. Yet only recently has the spatial and temporal distribution of land ownership been examined using biogeographical and evolutionary approaches. We incorporate biogeographical and evolutionary modelling to test associations between land ownership and en...

While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2,400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank...

When do the mechanisms of regular sound change fail to apply? What types of languages and situations exhibit and promote phonological stability? I consider these questions using data from the languages of Aboriginal Australia, where there has been debate on this question. I show that the standard explanations are inadequate, and possible solutions...

Bayesian phylogenetic methods have been gaining traction and currency in historical linguistics, as their potential for uncovering elements of language change is increasingly understood. Here, we demonstrate a proof of concept for using ancestral state reconstruction methods to reconstruct changes in morphology. We use a simple Brownian motion mode...

This study presents preliminary results of an automated prosodic clustering analysis of Bardi, a Nyulnyulan language from Northern Australia, using methods from Kaland (2021). Previous work on Bardi prosody identified several functions of boundary tones and two main phrase types, but stressed that findings were preliminary. Here we extend that work...

Here, we report on pilot research on the extent to which language collections in digital linguistic archives are discoverable, accessible, and usable for linguistic research. Using a test case of common tasks in phonetic and phonological documentation, we evaluate a small random sample of collections and find substantial, striking problems in all d...

While digital archiving has long been standard for linguistics, archives themselves are heterogeneous (Aznar & Seifart 2020), and archived linguistic material is important for researchers and communities, particularly for language reclamation (cf. Baldwin & Olds 2007; Whalen et al. 2016; Hinton 2003, 2018; Kung et al. 2020). The format and usabilit...

A guide to principles and methods for the management, archiving, sharing, and citing of linguistic research data, especially digital data. “Doing language science” depends on collecting, transcribing, annotating, analyzing, storing, and sharing linguistic research data. This volume offers a guide to linguistic data management, engaging with current...

A macroecological view suggests some global drivers of language endangerment and continuity, but a focus on individual languages will be important to stem the tide of language loss.

Kinship is a fundamental and universal aspect of the structure of human society. The kinship category of ‘grandparents’ is socially salient, owing to grandparents’ investment in the care of the grandchildren as well as to older generations’ control of wealth and cultural knowledge, but the evolutionary dynamics of grandparent terms has yet to be st...

Humans currently collectively use thousands of languages1,2. The number of languages in a given region (i.e. language “richness”) varies widely3–7. Understanding the processes of diversification and homogenization that produce these patterns has been a fundamental aim of linguistics and anthropology. Empirical research to date has identified variou...

Estimating the total human population size (i.e., abundance) of the preagricultural planet is important for setting the baseline expectations for human-environment interactions if all energy and material requirements to support growth, maintenance, and well-being were foraged from local environments. However, demographic parameters and biogeographi...

This article presents the results of investigations using topic modeling of the Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke MS408). Topic modeling is a set of computational methods which are used to identify clusters of subjects within text. We use latent dirichlet allocation, latent semantic analysis, and nonnegative matrix factorization to cluster Voynich pages...

Significance Around the world, more than 7,000 languages are spoken, most of them by small populations of speakers in the tropics. Globalization puts small languages at a disadvantage, but our understanding of the drivers and rate of language loss remains incomplete. When we tested key factors causing language attrition among Papua New Guinean stud...

Land ownership norms play a central role in social-ecological systems, and have been studied extensively as a component of ethnographies. Yet only recently has the distribution of land ownership norms across cultures been examined from evolutionary and ecological perspectives. Here we incorporate evolutionary and macroecological modelling to test a...

Papua New Guinea is home to >10% of the world’s languages and rich and varied biocultural knowledge, but the future of this diversity remains unclear. We measured language skills of 6,190 students speaking 392 languages (5.5% of the global total) and modelled their future trends, using individual-level variables characterizing family language use,...

Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data – in this instance, statistical phonotactics. We extract phonotactic data from 112 Pama-Nyungan vocabularies and apply tests for phy...

The Voynich Manuscript is a fifteenth-century illustrated cipher manuscript. In this overview of recent approaches to the Voynich Manuscript, we summarize and evaluate current work on the language that underlies this document. We provide arguments for treating the document as natural language (rather than a medieval hoax) and show how statistical a...

This paper outlines the creation of three corpora for multilingual comparison and analysis of the Voynich manuscript: a corpus of Voynich texts partitioned by Currier language, scribal hand, and transcription system, a corpus of 294 language samples compiled from Wikipedia, and a corpus of eighteen transcribed historical texts in eight languages. T...

Land ownership shapes natural resource management and social–ecological resilience, but the factors determining ownership norms in human societies remain unclear. Here we conduct a global empirical test of long‐standing theories from ecology, economics and anthropology regarding potential drivers of land ownership and territoriality. Prior theory s...

Kinship is a fundamental and universal aspect of the structure of human society. The kinship category of 'grandparents' is socially salient, owing to grandparents' investment in the care of the grandchildren as well as to older generations' control of wealth and cultural knowledge, but the evolutionary dynamics of grandparent terms has yet to be st...

Biogeographers and macroecologists have rarely used the fields’ theoretical and methodological advances to explore factors associated with geographical patterns in human diversity. Here we conduct a global empirical test of long-standing theories from ecology, economics, and anthropology regarding potential drivers of land ownership and territorial...

Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data--in this instance, statistical phonotactics. We extract phonotactic data from 128 Pama-Nyungan vocabularies and apply tests for phyl...

I survey some recent approaches to studying change in the lexicon, particularly change in meaning across phylogenies. I briefly sketch an evolutionary approach to language change and point out some issues in recent approaches to studying semantic change that rely on temporally stratified word embeddings. I draw illustrations from lexical cognate mo...

This paper presents the results of experiments on the minimally sufficient wordlist size for drawing phonological generalizations about languages. Given a limited lexicon for an underdocumented language, are conclusions that can be drawn from those data representative of the language as a whole? Linguistics necessarily involves generalizing from li...

Although many hypotheses have been proposed to explain why humans speak so many languages and why languages are unevenly distributed across the globe, the factors that shape geographical patterns of cultural and linguistic diversity remain poorly understood. Prior research has tended to focus on identifying universal predictors of language diversit...

How humans obtain food has dramatically reshaped ecosystems and altered both the trajectory of human history and the characteristics of human societies. Our species' subsistence varies widely, from predominantly foraging strategies, to plant-based agriculture and animal husbandry. The extent to which environmental, social and historical factors hav...

A crucial question for historical linguistics has been why some sound changes happen but not others. Recent work on the foundations of sound change has argued that subtle distributional facts about segments in a language, such as functional load, play a role in facilitating or impeding change. Thus not only are sound changes not all equally plausib...

Where a newly-married couple lives, termed post-marital residence, varies cross-culturally and changes over time. While many factors have been proposed as drivers of this change, among them general features of human societies like warfare, migration and gendered division of subsistence labour, little is known about whether changes in residence patt...

It remains a mystery how Pama-Nyungan, the world's largest hunter-gatherer language family, came to dominate the Australian continent. Some argue that social or technological advantages allowed rapid language replacement from the Gulf Plains region during the mid-Holocene. Others have proposed expansions from refugia linked to climatic changes afte...

Although there have long been links between research in historical linguistics and research in biological evolution, the last few years have witnessed growth in historical linguistic research that treats languages as evolutionary systems that can be investigated using tools from computational phylogenetics. In this review, I explore some of the adv...

Salikoko Mufwene’s (2017) ‘Language vitality’ ranges across many topics related to language endangerment and loss (LEL). In this response, I agree that linguists do need a theory of the reasons LEL occurs, if we are to be effective in aiding communities with language maintenance and revitalization. I argue that there is an existing, important liter...

Background Prehistoric human activities have contributed to the dispersal of many culturally important plants. The study of these traditional interactions can alter the way we perceive the natural distribution and dynamics of species and communities. Comprehensive research on native crops combining evolutionary and anthropological data is revealing...

Interview questions and anthropological evidence. (DOCX)

Short video showing a brief summary of a workshop held in early 2017, and aimed at bringing together Indigenous communities from the east coast of Australia to share and revive knowledge on Black Bean processing as a staple food item. (MP4)

Environmental niche models. (DOCX)

Additional genomic information. (DOCX)

Selected cultural data examples. (DOCX)

Aim Two fundamental questions about human language demand answers: why are so many languages spoken today and why is their geographical distribution so uneven? Although hypotheses have been proposed for centuries, the processes that determine patterns of linguistic and cultural diversity remain poorly understood. Previous studies, which relied on c...

Significance A major question in the study of both anthropology and cognitive science is why the world’s languages show recurrent similarities in color naming. Here we examine this inherently evolutionary question–the evolution of color systems in language–using phylogenetic methods. We track the evolution of color terms across a large language tre...

The population history of Aboriginal Australians remains largely uncharacterized. Here we generate high-coverage genomes for 83 Aboriginal Australians (speakers of Pama-Nyungan languages) and 25 Papuans from the New Guinea Highlands. We find that Papuan and Aboriginal Australian ancestors diversified 25-40 thousand years ago (kya), suggesting pre-H...

From the foods we eat and the houses we construct, to our religious practices and political organization, to who we can marry and the types of games we teach our children, the diversity of cultural practices in the world is astounding. Yet, our ability to visualize and understand this diversity is limited by the ways it has been documented and shar...

D-PLACE data and sources. (PDF)

Database structure. (PDF)

D-PLACE societies per language family. Currently, D-PLACE contains cultural data for over 1400 societies, drawn from two major cross-cultural datasets (the Ethnographic Atlas and Binford Hunter-Gatherer datasets). The societies are associated with 1202 unique languages and approximately 1315 dialects. Linguistic information for each society is avai...

Here I present the background to, and a description of, a newly developed database of historical and contemporary lexical data for Australian languages (Chirila), concentrating on the Pama-Nyungan family (the largest family in the country). While the database was initially developed in order to facilitate research on cognate words and reconstructio...

Researchers have long been interested in the evolution of culture and the ways in which change in cultural systems can be reconstructed and tracked. Within the realm of language, these questions are increasingly investigated with Bayesian phylogenetic methods. However, such work in cultural phylogenetics could be improved by more explicit quantific...

Linguists have long identified sound changes that occur in parallel. Now novel research shows how Bayesian modeling can capture complex concerted changes, revealing how evolution of sounds proceeds. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

If you are going to the trouble of travelling a long way to ask someone questions about their language, you need to have some way of recording their answers. You might want the recordings later on so that you can check your transcriptions. Perhaps the narratives you’ve recorded will be used for a talking book, or maybe you transcribed your recordin...

In this chapter, I address further topics which arise in working with morphological and syntactic field data.

In Chapter 3 we talked about basic analysis of early data, especially in working out a phoneme inventory. This chapter extends these ideas to discuss phonetic fieldwork (particularly acoustic phonetics), and gives some suggestions for research design for phonetics projects.

These days, there are few areas of the world where no previous work at all has been done on the languages spoken there. There have been many anthropologists, missionaries, linguists, and others searching out ‘uncontacted’ peoples for a hundred years or more. However, much of this material is unpublished, and there is great variation in both quality...

In §1.2.6, I gave a definition of successful fieldwork as one that produced results with which both the linguist and the community were satisfied. I have also stressed the importance of making an appropriate contribution to the community in which you are working. This chapter addresses issues of ‘returning’ materials to the community in which you h...

There are two important guidelines for choosing a field site. First, go somewhere you want to be: since it’s you who are going to go there, you should have some reason for going, even if it’s a fairly vague reason. Secondly, go someplace where people would like to work with you, or at least wouldn’t mind if you do language work.1 There are enough e...

Everyone has their own way of taking notes and organising data. Some insist on hardback books, others swear by index cards and folders, and others use spare envelopes. Many transcribe and organise data directly on a computer and use little paper at all. The aim of this chapter is not to tell you which notebook to use. Rather, I raise some of the is...

Being able to ask intelligible questions about language is one of the most important skills a fieldworker can have. How do you learn to ask people who haven’t studied linguistics about their language? How do you interpret their answers and how do you frame questions in a way that they can answer?

Doing fieldwork costs money. It’s cheap in comparison to some types of research, but there are still expenses to consider. This chapter describes the process of applying for fieldwork research grants, including what applications usually contain, the chronology of an application, and budgets.

Before you go to the field for the first time, there are a lot of preparations to make. You need to find a field site, gather the previous materials on the language, plan your early elicitation sessions, and work out how you’re going to find people to work with. You probably also need to apply for human subjects research approval and take care of t...

How can we define ethical research? A broad definition might be ‘a way of working that you, the research community, and the language community think is appropriate’. We can consider the question of ethics broadly, as the moral standards to which fieldworkers should adhere in their professional work, or more narrowly, in the legal sense, or the sens...

Field linguists are often told to rely on naturalistic data for their analyses as much as (or more than) elicited data. By ‘naturalistic data’, we often think of recorded narratives, or perhaps conversation. However, a comprehensive description of a language should be built not just on elicited data and narrations but also other types of spontaneou...

In the previous chapters I have discussed ways to gather data about phonology, morphology, and grammar. In this chapter, I describe the documentation of the lexicon of a language. Lexical documentation can be something done in conjunction with other work on the language; however, dictionary making is also an extensive enterprise in its own right. Y...

Wanderwörter are a problematic set of words in historical linguistics. They usually make up a small proportion of the total vocabulary of individual languages, and only a minority of loanwords. They are, however, found frequently in languages from across the world. There is, to our knowledge, no general synthesis of Wanderwörter patterns, causes of...

We compare the etymologies of ethnobiological nomenclature in 130 hunter-gatherer and agriculturist languages in Australia, North America, and Amazonia. Previous work has identified correlations between systems of ethnobiological terminology and dominant means of community subsistence, relating stability of terminology to the “salience” of the item...

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Phonetic Sources of Phonological Patterns: Synchronic and Diachronic Explanations (2003)

The notion that linguistic forms and meanings are related only by convention and not by any direct relationship between sounds and semantic concepts is a foundational principle of modern linguistics. Though the principle generally holds across the lexicon, systematic exceptions have been identified. These "sound symbolic" forms have been identified...

Australian languages are famous for their uniform phonological systems. Cross-linguistic surveys of (or including) Australian languages have reinforced this view of Australian inventories and phonotactics. Such uniformity is surprising and unusual given the phylogenetic diversity in the country (28 phylic families). Moreover, although Australianist...

The twenty-first Century has been billed the era of “big data”, and linguists are participating in this trend. We are seeing an increased reliance on statistical and quantitative arguments in most fields of linguistics, including the oldest parts of the field, such as the study of language change. The increased use of statistical methods changes th...

Our species displays remarkable linguistic diversity. Although the uneven distribution of this diversity demands explanation, the drivers of these patterns have not been conclusively determined. We address this issue in two steps: First, we review previous empirical studies whose authors have suggested environmental, geographical, and sociocultural...

Our species displays remarkable linguistic diversity. Although the uneven distribution of this diversity demands explanation, the drivers of these patterns have not been conclusively determined. We address this issue in two steps: First, we review previous empirical studies whose authors have suggested environmental, geographical, and sociocultural...

Contact-induced change among related languages has been considered problematic for language reconstruction. In this article, I consider several aspects of the theory of language change and ways in which contact might interact with language relatedness. I show that models of language change which extrapolate dialect-contact models to languages and s...

Bardi is the northernmost language of the Nyulnyulan family, a non-Pama-Nyungan family of the Western Kimberley region of northwestern Australia. Currently about five people speak the language fluently, but approximately 1,000 people identify as Bardi. The region was settled by Europeans in the 1880s and two missions were founded in Bardi country i...

We present the first proposal of detailed internal subgrouping and higher-order structure of the Pama-Nyungan family of Australian languages. Previous work has identified more than twenty-five primary subgroups in the family, with little indication of how these groups might fit together. Some work has assumed that reconstruction of higher nodes in...