Understanding Human History in Asia through linguistic analysis

This project will calibrate our understanding of linguistic change, and explore social interaction in Asia in areas and times for which there are no written records. It builds on interdisciplinary work rewriting the Austronesian expansion across Southeast Asia (Current Anthropology), recent breakthroughs in the computational treatment of linguistic data, and ongoing collaborative work assessing the Asia/Melanesia dichotomy. It will assess linguistic evidence with geographic, biological and ethnographic materials, at selected sample points. This will improve our understanding of social interactions within and across Asia, and will advance our quantitative understanding of language change – a major objective for linguistic theory.