A big, bright future for language science.

Linguistics is a subject with a proud past and an uncertain future. In theory, language science could be a vital hub discipline that links social sciences, humanities and the natural sciences. In this talk, I will outline some suggestions for how this could occur. I will discuss the importance of engaging with the challenges of big questions, big data, computational methods and working in big interdisciplinary teams. I will give examples of recent work in our Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology that attempts to meet these challenges.