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Can Bayesian phylogeography reconstruct migrations and expansions in linguistic evolution?

Nico Neureiter1,2, Peter Ranacher1,2, Rik van Gijn3,4

  • 1University Research Priority Program (URPP) Language and Space, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.

Royal Society Open Science
|February 22, 2021
PubMed
Summary

Bayesian phylogeography methods accurately reconstruct language expansions but struggle with migrations. New statistics help differentiate between migration and expansion scenarios in language evolution studies.

Keywords:
Bayesian phylogeneticslanguage evolutionphylogeography

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Area of Science:

  • Historical Linguistics
  • Computational Phylogenetics
  • Language Evolution

Background:

  • Bayesian phylogeography is applied to reconstruct language family origins and spread.
  • The accuracy of these reconstructions, particularly distinguishing migration from expansion, is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To evaluate the reliability of Bayesian phylogeographic methods in distinguishing between migration and expansion processes in language evolution.
  • To develop methods for identifying which spatial process best explains observed language distributions.

Main Methods:

  • Simulation study differentiating migration (discontinuous spread) and expansion (gradual spread).
  • Evaluation of state-of-the-art phylogeographic methods under varying directional trends.
  • Development of descriptive statistics to identify migration vs. expansion patterns.

Main Results:

  • Phylogeographic methods fail to accurately reconstruct migration events.
  • These methods perform well in reconstructing expansion events, even with strong directional biases.
  • Migration and expansion exhibit distinct phylogenetic and spatial signatures.

Conclusions:

  • Current Bayesian phylogeographic tools are more reliable for studying language expansions than migrations.
  • Proposed statistics can aid researchers in selecting appropriate models for spatial language evolution.
  • Recommendations are provided for assessing model adequacy in phylogeographic studies.