Interdisciplinary approaches to understanding language endangerment

Language diversity is under threat, with between a third to a half of the world’s spoken languages considered endangered, and predicted rates of loss equivalent to one language per month for the rest of the century. This seminar focuses on interdisciplinary research adapting methods developed in biology to study patterns and causes of language endangerment and loss. While the causes of language endangerment are different to those for species, their analyses must overcome similar challenges, including detecting significant patterns over stochastic processes, and avoiding confounding correlations due to phylogenetic non-independence and spatial autocorrelation. I will briefly discuss three case studies: using population modelling to study language shift over generations; adapting the genotype concept to identify risk factors for language loss in a small community; and application of macroecological approaches to describing global patterns and correlates of language endangerment, including prediction of future language loss.