[Lingtyp] Reporting cross-linguistic frequencies

Fri Nov 21 06:07:12 UTC 2025

Dear all — Here’s a quick explanation of why the assumption of an “isolated isolate” is profoundly strange:

Leaving aside sign languages, constructed languages, and artificial languages, nobody seems to entertain the possibility that languages have emerged spontaneously out of something that we wouldn’t consider a language itself over the last few thousands of years. In other words, the languages we consider isolates are without exception lone survivors; but they did descend from  ancestors which are often lost and unknown, and these ancestors biased the offshoot's properties by dint of inheritance/transmission.

The reason isolates are interesting from a sampling perspective is that they may represent entire genera or families without forcing us to pick a member. But being an isolate does not mean being free of phylogenetic bias. On the contrary: isolates of unknown descend are actually particularly problematic in the sense that they are shaped by biases that we have no way of identifying directly since the biasing ancestors have been lost to time.

As to contact. Languages that are not in contact with other languages over long stretches of time are extremely rare and unusual. In fact, as I’m sure everyone here is aware, such languages have been plausibly argued to tend to evolve exotic properties as a result of their isolation (Lupyan & Dale 2010; Trudgill 2011), although this is controversial (Shcherbakova et al. 2023). In any case, I would certainly not want to make such languages the basis for causal inference in typology.

But it gets a lot worse. The “isolated isolate” interpretation doesn’t just require us to think of a language that isn’t currently in contact with any other language. We would have to assume a language that has never come into contact with any other language at any point in its history (at least not long/intensively enough to change as a result of it). I’m seriously uncertain whether such a language has ever existed on this planet.

Here’s an analogy from quantum mechanics: Schrödinger’s and Heisenberg’s equations are mathematical models that describe the experimentally observed behavior of elementary particles under various conditions. The particle and the wave interpretation are interpretations that we use to make sense of these mathematical models. We find these models useful because most of us don’t think in mathematical equations (not even theoretical physicists, it would seem). But if we push these interpretations beyond a certain point, they break down. To begin with, we can’t think of something simultaneously as a wave and as a particle.

In the same way, we can mathematically describe the influence phylogeny and areality exert on the probability of a particular language having certain properties. The “isolated isolate” interpretation is just that - an interpretation of the statistical models; but, as I tried to show above, it runs into absurdities rather more quickly than the particle and wave interpretations in quantum mechanics.

Best — Juergen

G. Lupyan, R. Dale, Language structure is partly determined by social structure. PLOS ONE5, e8559 (2010).

O. Shcherbakova, S. M. Michaelis, H. J. Haynie, et al. Societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages. Scientific Advances 9, eadf7704 (2023).

P. Trudgill, Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity (OxfordUniv. Press, 2011).

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
Phone: (716) 645 0127
Fax: (716) 645 3825
Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu<mailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu>
Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/

Office hours Tu/Th 3:30-4:30pm in 642 Baldy or via Zoom (Meeting ID 585 520 2411; Passcode Hoorheh)

There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
(Leonard Cohen)

--

From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Matías Guzmán Naranjo via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Thursday, November 20, 2025 at 04:01
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Reporting cross-linguistic frequencies

I'll jump in with some thoughts.

- Dryer's method and ours aim at doing basically the same thing:
quantifying what's "left" after removing genetic and areal bias.

- Whether you should call them proportions or adjusted frequencies...
I'm not sure that it matters that much? As long as you understand how
they were calculated...

- How you want to interpret this "what's left" is debatable, I guess,
but I don't think I agree with Jürgen. As far as I can tell it should be
compatible with something along the lines of an "isolated isolate" as
described by Martin. You can also see them as 'universal' preferences
(more or less the same thing?).

- "the probability of a random language having a certain property
depends on (or is influenced by, or varies with, etc.) it being related
to certain other languages, or being  spoken (or signed) in a particular
area" -> In our approach we assumes that the probability of a language L
having some feature value F depends on three things: 1) its relatedness
to other languages, 2) its contact to other languages, 3) some universal
preference for F. Kind of the point of what we do is that we try to
estimate each of these factors. [We can add more factors and more
structure, but that's the most basic model]

- You can quantify the contribution of the phylogenetic component and
the areal component(s) with our techniques, but this is a bit tricky
because there is unavoidable overlap in the information each one
contains. These measures also have a different meaning than the adjusted
frequency and can't be used as a replacement for them, you can use them
in addition to.

Matías

El 20/11/25 a las 9:36, Omri Amiraz via Lingtyp escribió:
> Dear all,
> I agree with Ian that, in addition to genealogical and areal biases,
> the very question of what counts as a language versus a dialect is
> partly subjective. This makes actual frequencies even more
> problematic, since we would obtain different results depending on
> whether we treat Wu Chinese as one language or as thirty separate
> languages, as Ian pointed out.
> Juergen wrote: "We can empirically assess the extent to which the
> probability of a random language having a certain property depends on
> (or is influenced by, or varies with, etc.) it being related to
> certain other languages, or being  spoken (or signed) in a particular
> area."
>
> I wonder whether it might be useful to have a measure of the
> genealogical and areal spread of a feature, essentially quantifying
> how broadly it is distributed across families and regions in the
> present-day world. Such a measure might be more straightforward to
> interpret than an adjusted frequency/probability, since it is not
> clear whether the described population is a hypothetical set of
> isolated isolates or something else.
>
> Is anyone aware of an existing metric that captures genealogical or
> areal spread in this way?
>
> Best,
> Omri
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flistserv.linguistlist.org%2Fcgi-bin%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Flingtyp&data=05%7C02%7Cjb77%40buffalo.edu%7C88b1df86321b4cb12f9f08de28135c96%7C96464a8af8ed40b199e25f6b50a20250%7C0%7C0%7C638992260962407959%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=uY52%2BPtTVyzNB0LIowvZ0UzKWB6MWLR%2BG62V70JtNGE%3D&reserved=0<https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp>
_______________________________________________
Lingtyp mailing list
Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flistserv.linguistlist.org%2Fcgi-bin%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Flingtyp&data=05%7C02%7Cjb77%40buffalo.edu%7C88b1df86321b4cb12f9f08de28135c96%7C96464a8af8ed40b199e25f6b50a20250%7C0%7C0%7C638992260962443120%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=X%2F1JMgRNS%2Bn0ZlGa7pPdsJWJBoJy%2BYJt6bHWktCMeRc%3D&reserved=0<https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20251121/7097e5c5/attachment.htm>