Our species has the peculiar ability to accumulate cultural innovations over multiple
generations, a phenomenon termed 'cumulative cultural evolution'(CCE). Recent years have …

Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The linguistic
niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial …

The amount of available digital data for the languages of the world is constantly increasing.
Unfortunately, most of the digital data are provided in a large variety of formats and therefore …

From emails to social media, from instant messaging to political memes, the way we produce
and transmit culture is radically changing. Understanding the consequences of the massive …

Islands have played a prominent role in evolutionary and ecological theory, centring the
theoretical framework for understanding biodiversity in terms of isolation and area and …

As one of the most specific, yet most diverse of human behaviors, language is shaped by
both genomic and extra-genomic evolution. Sharing methods and models between these …

A growing number of studies seek to identify predictors of broad-scale patterns in human
cultural diversity, but three sources of non-independence in human cultural variables can …

Here we present an expanded version of bdproto, a database comprising phonological
inventory data from 257 ancient and reconstructed languages. These data were extracted …

Bayesian phylogenetic methods provide a set of tools to efficiently evaluate large linguistic
datasets by reconstructing phylogenies—family trees—that represent the history of language …

This paper brings together typological and sociolinguistic approaches to language variation.
Its main aim is to evaluate the relative effect of language internal and external factors on the …