We’ve praised the work of Minna Sundberg before, and here, as part of her Stand Still. Stay Silent webcomic, she’s illustrated the family trees of Indo-European and Uralic languages. The full tree is ...

Language trees are useful for depicting relationships of communities in the past 5,000 to 10,000 years or so, a period too short to be resolved by genetics–and exactly the time for which ...

The dating of ancient languages by a technique called glottochronology is undergoing a revival, stimulated by the computational and statistical methods used to tease out evolutionary relationships in ...

The diversity of human languages can be likened to branches on a tree. If you’re reading this in English, you’re on a branch that traces back to a common ancestor with Scots, which traces back to a ...

TREES are a gift to students of the past. An entire discipline, known as dendrochronology, is devoted to using tree rings to date ancient wooden objects and buildings. Linguistic archaeologists, it ...

Wondering if monogamy was more popular than polygamy in the 19th and 20th centuries? Curious to know which societies are linked to a common ancestor on a language tree? A University of Toronto ...

We break down what roles different types of words and phrases play within a sentence. There are many theories of syntax and different ways to represent grammatical structures, but one of the simplest ...