What is Historical Glottometry?

Since 2011, Alexandre François (CNRS, Paris; ANU) and Siva Kalyan (Australian National University, Canberra) have been working on a joint project: the development of Historical Glottometry, a quantitative method meant to deal with the genealogy of language families.Rather than rely on the Tree model, Historical Glottometry takes into account all historical innovations in a given language family (or “linkage”), even when they show overlapping patterns.

For each attested subgroup, the model helps compute degrees of “cohesiveness” (kappa κ) and of “subgroupiness” (sigma ς). One possible output is a “glottometric diagram” such as the one shown here [left].

To know more, you can visit our HG homepage; or you may read the following references:

• François, Alexandre. 2014.   Trees, waves and linkages: models of language diversification. In Claire Bowern & Bethwyn Evans (eds.), The Routledge handbook of historical linguistics, 161–189. New York: Routledge.
• Kalyan, Siva & Alexandre François. 2018.   Freeing the Comparative Method from the tree model: A framework for Historical Glottometry. In Ritsuko Kikusawa & Lawrence Reid (eds), Let’s talk about trees: Genetic Relationships of Languages and Their Phylogenic Representation (Senri Ethnological Studies, 98). Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. 59–89.
• Kalyan, Siva & Alexandre François. 2019. When the waves meet the trees: A response to Jacques & List. In Siva Kalyan, Alexandre François & Harald Hammarström (eds), Understanding language genealogy: Alternatives to the tree model. Special issue of Journal of Historical Linguistics 9/1: 167–176.
• François, Alexandre & Siva Kalyan. f/c.  Subgrouping: Trees vs. waves. In Claire Bowern & Bethwyn Evans (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge.

 

 

Historical Glottometry online analyzer

You can try out Historical Glottometry yourself, using your own data. Check out our Historical Glottometry online analyzer, and follow the guidelines to produce your own glottometric results!

Tip: Before you try out the engine with your own data files, we recommend you download the two following files, which should work for a preliminary demonstration:

• CSV spreadsheet with historical data on shared innovations for “Demo”,
  a fictitious language family with 18 members (“ⓁA” → “ⓁR”);
• CSV spreadsheet with geographical coordinates for the fictitious “Demo” family.

We suggest you download these two CSV files (Unicode text) on your computer, so you can then upload them in the next couple of screens.

Here is how you can cite our engine:

You may also contact us if you wish to receive advice on how to format your historical data for this analysis.