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Linguistic phylogeography

2025· book-chapter· en· W4412559809 on OpenAlexaff
Søren Wichmann

Bibliographic record

VenueOxford University Press eBooks · 2025
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLanguage and cultural evolution
Canadian institutionsInnovation Cluster (Canada)
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPhylogeographyLinguisticsBiologyPhilosophyPhylogeneticsGenetics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Linguistic phylogeography is concerned with the reconstruction of the geographical distribution of lineages pertaining to a specific language family (phylogeny). This chapter reviews both traditional methods and modern computational ones. The computational methods draw upon information from the range of languages in a phylogeny, inferring origins and patterns of dispersal from current patterns. Some draw upon the structure of phylogenetic trees, some do not. This chapter outlines the different methods, recapitulates the results of general evaluations, and identifies the challenges that they face, some of which are shared across the board. As a contribution unique to this chapter, hypothetical homelands for all the world’s language families as well as their subgroups generated by the new ‘minimal distance’ method are published here for the first time.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.034
Threshold uncertainty score0.114

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0030.003
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0020.002
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0340.004

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.230
Teacher spread0.213 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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