How isolation and contact shape structural linguistic distributions: insights from population genetics" – talk by Anna Graff and colleagues at ICHL27
Presented in Santiago de Chile on 18th August 2025, this talk outlines a novel approach that leverages insights from population genetics as a proxy for (language) contact and isolation to study the effects of contact on structural linguistic diversity systematically. In our two global-scale studies, we employmultilevel Bayesian models to integrate genetic and linguistic data from the Genes and Languages Together (GeLaTo) database (Barbieri et al., 2022) and two new aggregations of typological databases that minimize inter-feature dependencies. The first study quantifies the impact of contact between unrelated languages on linguistic structures, using global patterns of genetic admixture as a proxy for contact. The second study focuses on spatially constrained interactions, employing a geostatistical analysis of structural diversity, using levels of excess genetic homozygosity to infer the degree of contact vs. isolation.