Studies that uses characters to construct phylogenetic trees

Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement

Gray et al. (2009) investigated the origin and spread of the Austronesian language family by constructing a phylogeny of 400 Austronesian languages using lexical data and Bayesian methods. 210 lexical items including simple verbs, words for colors, numbers and animals from each of the languages were used. The origin of the Austronesian family was predicted to be in Taiwan approximately 5230 years before present. It was also revealed that the Austronesians spread through the Pacific in a series of expansion pulses and settlement pauses and this “pulse-pause” scenario is closely related with geographic expansions made possible by the availability of social and technological resources. The first pause may be attributed to the challenges in crossing the 350-km Bashi channel into the Philippines from Taiwan. The advancement in technology allowed the Austronesians to venture into new territories using new sailing modes, as seen in Pulse 1. The second pause was again, due to the difficulties in reaching far-flung islands of Eastern Polynesia. Later on, technological and social advancements have enabled the fourth pulse into Micronesia. The language phylogenies has enabled us to find many answers regarding cultural evolution and human prehistory.

Fig. 7. Phylogenetic tree of 400 Austronesian languages
(Gray et al., 2009: 480)

Studies that uses phylogenetic trees to study language evolution

The Origin and Evolution of Word Order

Gell-mann and Ruhlen (2011) examined the word order of 2135 languages using a presumed phylogenetic tree of the world’s languages. They studied the distribution of the six word orders: SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OSV and OVS among the 2135 languages and found that the word order of the ancestral language is SOV. They suggested that most if not all of the modern languages derived from that very first SOV language and that those languages with the SOV word order simply preserved the original word order, except for languages which borrowed the word order from neighbouring languages. The large number of SOV languages today is not owing to the fact that this word order is “universally preferred” but simply because these languages inherited their word order from the ancestral language and have remain unchanged. The change in word order follows a particular pattern, that is it is almost always the case that SOV>SVO and SVO>VSO/VOS. Rare word orders like OSV and OVS may also have derived directly from SOV.

Fig. 8. The evolution of word order
(Gell-mann & Ruhlen, 2011: 17291)