Mahé Ben Hamed

Neighbour-nets portray the Chinese dialect continuum and the linguistic legacy of China's demic history

As with species studied by evolutionary biologists, languages are evolving entities. They can evolve in tree-like patterns, possibly blurred by borrowing, but they can also develop in non-tree-like schemes. For instance, diglossia, as in the case of Chinese, can counterbalance the hierarchical pattern expected from differentiation by internal change associated with isolation by distance of speech communities. Using two lexical datasets, either the basic lexicon supposedly more immune to borrowing or a representative sample of the whole lexicon, we investigate the development pattern of Chinese dialects using a neighbour-net approach, which is an unprejudiced technique for representing object relationships. The resulting graphs are consistent with a dialect continuum shaped by counterbalanced effects of homogenizing diglossia and borrowing versus differentiating spread of speech communities. Historical events and linguistic claims can be mapped on these graphs.

Phylo-linguistics: Enacting Darwin’s Linguistic Image

Linguistics was the first of the Humanities to respond to Darwin’s theory of evolution, showing how similar principles were at work to create the observed diversity of the world’s languages. In the past 15 years, a methodological shift brought this theoretical analogy to a new life by actually accommodating computational models and methods from (molecular) Phylogenetics to explore and test hypotheses about the evolution of languages and cultures, transforming the initial intuitions into a full-fledged methodological framework with extensive applications in Linguistics and Anthropology.