Interdisciplinary Approaches to Understanding Language Endangerment | SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 24/03/2022

Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change.

SOAS Linguistics webinars
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Understanding Language Endangerment

Lindell Bromham
Research School of Biology, Australian National University

Felicity Meakins
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Languages, School of Languages and Cultures, University of Queensland

The past decade has seen a flowering of collaboration between evolutionary biologists and linguists. Useful analytical tools from evolutionary biology have been applied to many long standing problems in language evolution. In this talk, we will describe interdisciplinary collaborations between linguists and evolutionary biologists that have allowed us to develop new ways of asking interesting questions about language change, including questions at the “macro” level (concerning global patterns of language diversity and endangerment) and “micro” level (focussing on language change over generations within a single population). 

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6381878