Diachronic Atlas of Comparative Linguistics

24/04/2026

The DiACL database has been down due to a server relocation but is now functional again!

14/06/2025

Two conferences on language phylogenies in a row!

13/04/2024

The DiACL database is now up and functional at the Goethe University server. Like before, a majority of the data is openly available.
https://diacl.uni-frankfurt.de/

24/12/2023

We wish our followers Happy Holidays! The DiACL database is relocating from Lund University to Frankfurt and will soon be up!

17/06/2022

Lexibank available! Browse DiACL data via the Lexibank repository https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01432-0

23/05/2022

New Research Topic: The Evolution of Meaning: Challenges in Quantitative Lexical Typology for Frontiers in Communication/Psychology.
https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/38650/the-evolution-of-meaning-challenges-in-quantitative-lexical-typology

27/01/2022

New paper out: "Expansion by migration and diffusion by contact is a source to the global diversity of linguistic nominal categorization systems", in Humanities & Social Science Communications

Languages of diverse structures and different families tend to share common patterns if they are spoken in geographic proximity. This convergence is often explained by horizontal diffusibility, which is typically ascribed to language contact. In such a scenario, speakers of two or more languages int...

24/11/2021

Workshop at ICHL 2022, Oxford "Recent advances in computational historical linguistics: New methods and results", organized by Russell Gray (MPI, Leipzig) and Gerd Carling (Lund University)

We are pleased to announce that ICHL 25 will include eight workshops, to be held on the Tuesday afternoon of the conference. Details of the workshops can be found below; if you wish to submit an abstract for consideration for one of these workshops, please state this clearly in your submission. Acti...

17/09/2021

DiACL has a new design to indicate that data and functionality has been substantially improved.

01/09/2021

New study reconstructs the evolution of Indo-European grammar

This study uses phylogenetic methods adopted from computational biology in order to reconstruct features of Proto-Indo-European morphosyntax. We estimate the probability of the presence of typological features in Proto-Indo-European on the assumption that these features change according to a stochas...

27/08/2021

New study explains how Scandinavian languages got two genders instead of three. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-germanic-linguistics/article/gender-assignment-in-six-north-scandinavian-languages-patterns-of-variation-and-change/2681DEA4AE438C5B8891270D4C72DEBE
Popular summary here: https://gerdcarling.se/blog/how-scandinavian-languages-got-two-genders

Gender Assignment in Six North Scandinavian Languages: Patterns of Variation and Change - Volume 33 Issue 3