ABSTRACT
Linguistic phylogenetics incorporates the whole approach of the phylogenetic comparative method – using language phylogenies as the historical backbone to quantitative models of language change in order to test hypotheses about human dispersals, processes of cultural change, and the evolution of other linguistic subsystems. The earliest, and until recently the most widely used character-based method for inferring phylogeny was the parsimony method. Distance-based methods of phylogenetic inference all use some kind of distance metric to measure how much each taxon differs from every other one. An alternative family of approaches to phylogenetic inference, known as character-based models of change, estimates the relationship between two languages by inferring the pathways by which each evolved from their common ancestor. Quantitative phylogenetic approaches to language change should not be treated solely as an alternative to traditional methods in historical linguistics. Recent advances in quantitative approaches to language history have put diachronic approaches at the forefront of modern linguistics.
