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      The geography and development of language isolates

      research-article
      Royal Society Open Science
      The Royal Society
      language isolates, language geography, language diversity, isolation by environment

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          Abstract

          This contribution theorizes the historical dynamics of so-called language isolates, languages which cannot be demonstrated to belong to any known language family. On the basis of a qualitative review of how isolates, language families or their branches lost territory to other languages through time, I develop a simple model for the genesis of isolates as a function of proximity to major geographical barriers, and pit it against an alternative view that sees them as one manifestation of linguistic diversity generally. Using a variety of statistical techniques, I test both accounts quantitatively against a worldwide dataset of language locations and distances to geographical barriers, and find support for the position that views language isolates as one manifestation of linguistic diversity generally. However, I caution that different processes which are not necessarily mutually exclusive may have shaped the present-day distribution of language isolates. These may form elements of a broader theory of language isolates in particular and language diversity in general.

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            On a Test of Whether one of Two Random Variables is Stochastically Larger than the Other

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              Simple Features for R: Standardized Support for Spatial Vector Data

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                R Soc Open Sci
                RSOS
                royopensci
                Royal Society Open Science
                The Royal Society
                2054-5703
                April 14, 2021
                April 2021
                : 8
                : 4
                : 202232
                Affiliations
                Center for Advanced Studies ‘Words, Bones, Genes, Tools', University of Tübingen, , Rümelinstrasse 19-23, 72070 Tübingen, Germany
                Author notes

                Electronic supplementary material is available online at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5365232.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7633-7433
                Article
                rsos202232
                10.1098/rsos.202232
                8059667
                33996125
                1442865d-03bb-4a86-9836-665abb86a8ee
                © 2021 The Authors.

                Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : December 9, 2020
                : March 22, 2021
                Funding
                Funded by: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659;
                Award ID: UR 310/1-1
                Funded by: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100002345;
                Categories
                1001
                60
                70
                Ecology, Conservation, and Global Change Biology
                Research Articles

                language isolates,language geography,language diversity,isolation by environment

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