Evolutionary network analysis of word lists: Visualising the relationships between alpine romance languages
Peter Forster, Alfréd Tóth, Hans‐Jürgen Bandelt · Journal of Quantitative Linguistics · 1998
The tree model and the wave model of language evolution are united into one geometric network model. A related approach has previously been used for reconstructing DNA evolution, and we now present a network approach for diagnostic word lists of closely related languages. When applied to 17 Alpine Romance languages, the resulting evolutionary network reproduces known linguistic relationships and also fairly accurately reflects the geographic location of each language.