About
I’m an Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland, and Co-Director of the Centre for Computational Evolution. Before that I was 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 in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language at the Australian National University.
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Research
I study language evolution and cultural evolution: why and how humans created the remarkable diversity of languages we see today, and what that diversity reveals about our shared prehistory. My work sits at the intersection of linguistics, evolutionary biology, and anthropology, and uses computational and statistical methods — especially Bayesian phylogenetics — to reconstruct the history of languages and cultures and to test hypotheses about how they change over time.
Much of my research focuses on the Austronesian languages and the settlement of the Pacific: how people navigated and colonised the largest ocean on Earth, and how their languages and cultures diversified along the way. More broadly, I’m interested in the tempo and rates of language change, how linguistic structures evolve and co-adapt, and how cultural traits such as social organisation and religion evolve alongside language.
You can browse this work on my publications page, and the databases and tools it draws on among my projects.
Databases & software
Answering these questions at scale needs large, well-curated, openly available data. I build and contribute to databases and tools that make comparative linguistic and cultural data usable for quantitative research, including the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database, POLLEX-Online, TransNewGuinea.org, CLICS, Lexibank, Grambank, Kinbank, D-PLACE, Pulotu, and GELATO, many of them built on Cross-Linguistic Data Formats (CLDF). You can see the full list on the projects page.
I’m a strong advocate for open, reproducible research, and much of my code is available on GitHub.
Elsewhere
You can browse my publications here, or find them on Google Scholar and ORCID. My code is on GitHub, and I’m on Bluesky.
Or email me at simonsimonnetnz.