ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2011
Networks uncover hidden lexical borrowing in Indo-European language evolution.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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19 citing papers in PubMed, 131 citations in OpenAlex.
- Tracing contact and migration in pre-Bantu Southern Africa through lexical borrowing.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Inferring language dispersal patterns with velocity field estimation.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Automated identification of borrowings in multilingual wordlists.Open research Europe · 2021Article
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- Reconciling the father tongue and mother tongue hypotheses in Indo-European populations.National science review · 2019Article
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- Using hybridization networks to retrace the evolution of Indo-European languages.BMC evolutionary biology · 2016Article
- Unity and disunity in evolutionary sciences: process-based analogies open common research avenues for biology and linguistics.Biology direct · 2016Review
- Human population history revealed by a supertree approach.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Punctuated equilibrium in the large-scale evolution of programming languages.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2015Article
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- Networks of lexical borrowing and lateral gene transfer in language and genome evolution.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2014Article
- Word formation is aware of morpheme family size.PloS one · 2014Article
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- Cultural macroevolution on neighbor graphs : vertical and horizontal transmission among Western North American Indian societies.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2012Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Language evolution is traditionally described in terms of family trees with ancestral languages splitting into descendent languages. However, it has long been recognized that language evolution also entails horizontal components, most commonly through lexical borrowing. For example, the English language was heavily influenced by Old Norse and Old French; eight per cent of its basic vocabulary is borrowed. Borrowing is a distinctly non-tree-like process--akin to horizontal gene transfer in genome evolution--that cannot be recovered by phylogenetic trees. Here, we infer the frequency of hidden borrowing among 2346 cognates (etymologically related words) of basic vocabulary distributed across 84 Indo-European languages. The dataset includes 124 (5%) known borrowings. Applying the uniformitarian principle to inventory dynamics in past and present basic vocabularies, we find that 1373 (61%) of the cognates have been affected by borrowing during their history. Our approach correctly identified 117 (94%) known borrowings. Reconstructed phylogenetic networks that capture both vertical and horizontal components of evolutionary history reveal that, on average, eight per cent of the words of basic vocabulary in each Indo-European language were involved in borrowing during evolution. Basic vocabulary is often assumed to be relatively resistant to borrowing. Our results indicate that the impact of borrowing is far more widespread than previously thought.
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