Genealogical linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that classifies languages into genealogical groups and subgroups and formulates hypotheses about the (degree of) relatedness among linguistic varieties. After introducing the established methodology of genealogical linguistics and discussing its limitations, I will present selected empirical, theoretical, and methodological developments in genealogical classification, including some controversial lines of inquiry. I will also briefly assess the potential of computational phylogenetic models and interdisciplinary approaches for genealogical linguistics.
Among other things, you will learn why relatedness and similarity are entirely different concepts; whether languages can shift their genealogical affiliation (at least in the minds of linguists); what distinguishes identical from shared linguistic innovations and why this distinction matters; why the tree (Stammbaum) model of linguistic divergence is too restrictive to capture linguistic history adequately; why we can hardly expect to reconstruct a Proto–Homo sapiens language; why the practice of genealogical linguistics has significant social dimensions; and even about a spurious Amazonian language once “discovered” by a Czech cactologist.
