Linguistic Phylogenies Are Not the Same as Biological Phylogenies

(Note: This post is jointly written by Martin Lewis and Asya Pereltsvaig)
A key assumption of Bouckaert et al. is that the diversification and spread of languages operates so similarly to the diversification and spread of biological organism that the two processes can successfully be modeled in the same manner. The parallels between organic and linguistic evolution are indeed pronounced. Both …