Germanic dispersion beyond trees and waves

• Applicant: Professor Dr. George Walkden
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 429663384

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

The project has led to a new understanding of the emergence of the Germanic language family in its modern form. To do so it drew upon linguistic analysis and methods from phylogenetics and agent-based modelling. The overall picture is one in which different populations speaking different Germanic languages diverged socially and geographically from a residual ‘core’ of Germanic speakers at different times. The project’s findings have implications for our understanding of a variety of linguistic phenomena in Germanic languages (breaking, labial mutation, adjectival articles, verb doubling). They also contribute to a broader debate in historical linguistics on how best to model linguistic diversification and the value of different computational methods for this purpose.

Publications

• The Vandalic Language – Origins and Relationships. FELIX MEINER VERLAG.
  Hartmann, Frederik
  
• Old Frisian Breaking and Labial Mutation Revisited. Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik, 80(4), 462-475.
  Hartmann, Frederik
  
• The Burgundian language and its phylogeny. NOWELE. North-Western European Language Evolution, 75(1), 42-80.
  Hartmann, Frederik & Riegger, Chiara
  
• Germanic Phylogeny. Oxford University PressOxford.
  Hartmann, Frederik
  
• Adjectival articles in early Germanic. In K. Bech and A. Pfaff, eds., Noun phrases in early Germanic languages, pages 323–364. Berlin: Language Science Press
  Pfaff, Alexander & George Walkden
  
• An agent-based modelling approach to wave-like diversification of language families. Diachronica, 41(3), 330-354.
  Hartmann, Frederik
  
• The strength of the phylogenetic signal in syntactic data. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 9(1).
  Hartmann, Frederik & Walkden, George