Welcome to our marama homepage – a project by Alexandre François (CNRS, Paris; ANU) and Siva Kalyan (Australian National University, Canberra).
One aspect of the marama project is 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 then 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:
- 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.
- 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.
Historical Glottometry online analyzer
As of October 2021, you can also 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.
Here is how you can cite our engine:
- Kalyan, Siva & Alexandre François. 2021. Historical Glottometry online analyzer. The Marama project. ANU, Canberra – CNRS, Paris. https://marama.huma-num.fr/Glotto (accessed: date).
