Language is fundamental to being human, but very little is known about how language changes over time or how other aspects of human society may change in concert with language. Language is a crucial tool for investigating the past. While archaeology and genetics are also invaluable ways to investigate how cultures have changed, in many areas, language provides better preserved evidence for past contacts, migrations, and cultural change. A great deal of previous work has shown that languages change over time, and that they do so in regular ways. It is also known that speakers adapt their languages to their cultures, and that languages reflect aspects of culture such as politeness. However, in order to understand why the world's 7000 languages look the way they do, untangling the relationships between language and society is crucial.
This research uses the languages of Aboriginal Australia as a case study. Previous work by this research group has resulted in the development of tools and databases for exploring language relationships and studying how change in cultural and language systems may happen together. The researchers will utilize these research tools to shed further light on how languages change, using the existing data to develop new tools for investigating language history. Specifically, the investigators will study the patterns of sounds, words, and meanings in these languages to uncover how they have changed over time. Australian languages are ideal for such studies because of the similar population sizes and political complexity of the groups in the period before European settlement, as well as the sizable corpus of existing material. This study will add to this material and test hypotheses about language relationships using statistical and comparative tools. This will allow researchers to identify new languages in old materials as well as refine knowledge of how languages change. A substantial component of the grant work involves including students in cutting-edge research, including training in linguistics and statistical methods.
