Associate Professor, University of Auckland
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.
Research on 2,400 languages shows nearly half the world's language diversity is at risk
Apr 23, 2023 12:41 pm UTC| Insights & Views
There are more than 7,000 languages in the world, and their grammar can vary a lot. Linguists are interested in these differences because of what they tell us about our history, our cognitive abilities and what it means to...
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