From now on, I will use this forum to share nice pictures, interesting thoughts, and news from my research on language diversity and evolution, Tocharian, Romani, and Amazonian languages. Stay in the loop! My first post gives a map of the diversity in Eur

In this blog, I will try – as far as possible – to switch between lexicon and grammar. Most topics are related to ongoing research either by me or by people in our research group. I will also try to have PhDs and other researchers writing guest posts, sha

Density heatmaps indicating the frequency of languages as source (y) and target (x) language in loan events, by their ranking in a Language Power Index rank.A study in PLOS ONE shows that borrowing is hierchical: borrowings are most likely to take place f

On October 25-26, all Tocharian specialists of the world gather in Vienna, Austria. Only a few years ago, these conferences would fit in an elevator; now, there are 30 participants, which is a huge improvement: the field is growing rapidly in terms of pro

The large Scandinavian languages, such as Swedish and Danish, have lost their three-gender system to a system of commune and neuter. However, several smaller dialects or languages, such as Jamtlandic and Elfdalian, have preserved the system of three gende

Dear readers and followers of this blog: from now on, the blog will change its focus and scope. I will not update every second week with blog posts on specific topics. Rather, I will update the blog  with news from our research group as well as other

Continuing my blogposts about gender, I will say a few words about gender stability. Over time, words often change their gender. This is well known, for instance, in Germanic languages, the words for 'sun' and 'moon' are feminine and masculine respectivel

This week's blog post will deal with a complex topic: gender assignment. As I have described in a previous post, gender involves a classification of nominal entities in language. Gender can generally be defined as classes of nouns which are reflected in t