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.

Currently I'm one of the editors of Language Dynamics and Change and on the editorial board of the Journal of Language Evolution.

I'm a senior scientist in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language at Australian National University.

Publications:

Tresoldi T, Rzymski C, Forkel R, Greenhill SJ, List JM, & Gray R. 2022. Managing historical linguistic data for computational phylogenetics and computer-assisted language comparison. In Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, Bradley McDonnell, Eve Koller, & Lauren B. Collister (Eds). Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management.
Abstract PDF 10.7551/mitpress/12200.001.0001

Computational phylogenetics is a relatively recent branch of historical linguistics that uses quantitative techniques to investigate the history of related languages. As the classical comparative method is less explicit on the techniques for constructing phylogenies of language families (see discussion in Jacques & List 2019), such a new approach can complement traditional techniques for …
Bromham L, Dinnage R, Skirgård H, Ritchie A, Cardillo M, Meakins F, Greenhill S & Hua X. 2021. Global predictors of language endangerment and the future of linguistic diversity. Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Abstract 10.1038/s41559-021-01604-y

Language diversity is under threat. While each language is subject to specific social, demographic and political pressures, there may also be common threatening processes. We use an analysis of 6,511 spoken languages with 51 predictor variables spanning aspects of population, documentation, legal recognition, education policy, socioeconomic indicators and environmental features to show that, …
Leisterer-Peoples SM, Ross CT, Greenhill SJ, Hardecker S & Haun DBM. 2021. Games and enculturation: A cross-cultural analysis of cooperative goal structures in Austronesian games. PLOS ONE 16(11): e0259746.
Abstract PDF 10.1371/journal.pone.0259746

While most animals play, only humans play games. As animal play serves to teach offspring important life-skills in a safe scenario, human games might, in similar ways, teach important culturally relevant skills. Humans in all cultures play games; however, it is not clear whether variation in the characteristics of games across cultural groups is related to group-level attributes. Here we …
Greenhill SJ. 2021. Do languages and genes share cultural evolutionary history? Science Advances, eabm2472.
Abstract PDF 10.1126/sciadv.abm2472

Languages and genes tell stories about the past but statistical analysis reveals that these are not always the same.
Hoffmann K, Bouckaert R, Greenhill SJ, & Kühnert D. 2021. Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of linguistic data using BEAST. Journal of Language Evolution, lzab005.
Abstract PDF 10.1093/jole/lzab005

Bayesian phylogenetic methods provide a set of tools to efficiently evaluate large linguistic datasets by reconstructing phylogenies—family trees—that represent the history of language families. These methods provide a powerful way to test hypotheses about prehistory, regarding the subgrouping, ori- gins, expansion, and timing of the languages and their speakers. Through phylogenetics, we gain …

Projects:

Glottobank

Glottobank is an international research consortium established to document and understand the world’s linguistic diversity. We have established five global databases documenting variation in language structure (Grambank), lexicon (Lexibank), paradigm systems (Parabank), numerals (Numeralbank), and phonetic changes (Phonobank).

Database of Places, Language, Culture and Environment

From the foods we eat, to who we can marry, to 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 often limited by the ways it traditionally has been documented and shared: on a culture-by-culture basis, in locally-told stories or difficult-to-access books and articles. D-PLACE represents an attempt to bring together this dispersed corpus of information.

Trans-New Guinea Online

TransNewGuinea.org is a database of the Trans-New Guinea language family and friends. The Trans-New Guinea language family currently occupies most of the interior of New Guinea. This family is possibly the third largest in the world with 400 languages and is tentatively thought to have originated with root-crop agriculture around 10,000 years ago. However, vanishingly little is known about this family’s history.

POLLEX: Polynesian Lexicon Project Online

The Polynesian Lexicon Project Online is a large-scale comparative dictionary of Polynesian languages.

Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database

The Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database is the world’s largest cross-linguistic database of the Pacific. It contains ~300,000 lexical items from ~1,600 languages spoken throughout the Pacific region.