Dr. Simon J. Greenhill
I research why and how people created all the amazing languages around us, and what they tell us about human prehistory.
I use (mainly) Bayesian phylogenetic methods to tackle these questions and have investigated everything from how the Austronesian peoples settled the Pacific, to modelling the co-evolution of linguistic structure. And I have built a number of large-scale databases to help answer these questions.
You can find me on Twitter or Mastodon, at the University of Auckland.
Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The linguistic niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial proportions of nonnative speakers (societies of strangers) tend to lose grammatical distinctions. In contrast, languages in small, isolated communities should maintain or expand their grammatical markers. Here, we test these claims using a global dataset of grammatical structures, Grambank. We model the impact of the number of native speakers, the proportion of nonnative speakers, the number of linguistic neighbors, and the …
Abstract PDF 10.1126/sciadv.adf7704Greenhill SJ. 2023. A shared foundation of language change. Science, 6656, 374-375.
As the world changes, humans encounter new things that need to be described using a finite set of words. A common strategy for labeling these novelties is to reuse existing words—i.e., word meaning extension. For example, “mouse” can refer to a computer control device. Children also creatively overextend word meanings as they learn their languages. The need to name novelties has been present during the evolution of language, often resulting in the use of one word to express two different meanings. For example, Russian labels (colexifies) both “tree” and “wood” with “derevo” (1); this is a …
Abstract 10.1126/science.adj2154
Almost half the world’s population speaks a language of the Indo-European language family. It remains unclear, however, where this family’s common ancestral language (Proto-Indo-European) was initially spoken and when and why it spread through Eurasia. The “Steppe” hypothesis posits an expansion out of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, no earlier than 6500 years before present (yr B.P.), and mostly with horse-based pastoralism from ~5000 yr B.P. An alternative “Anatolian” or “farming” hypothesis posits that Indo-European dispersed with agriculture out of parts of the Fertile Crescent, beginning as …
Abstract PDF 10.1126/science.abg0818 Overview
Subgrouping language varieties within dialect continua poses challenges for the application of the comparative method of historical linguistics, and similar claims have been made for the use of Bayesian phylogenetic methods. In this article, we present the first Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of the Mixtecan language family of southern Mexico and show that the method produces valuable results and new insights with respect to subgrouping beyond what the comparative method and dialect geography have provided. Our findings reveal potential new subgroups that should be further investigated. We …
Abstract PDF 10.1093/jole/lzad004
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