Compare methods
Review your selected methods side by side; rows that differ are highlighted.
| Glottochronology (Lexical Dating)× | Lexicostatistics× | |
|---|---|---|
| Field | Linguistics | Linguistics |
| Family | Process / pipeline | Process / pipeline |
| Year of origin | 1952 | 1952 |
| Originator | Morris Swadesh | Morris Swadesh |
| Type≠ | Estimation of time depth of language separation from cognate retention | Quantitative comparison of basic vocabulary to estimate genealogical relatedness |
| Seminal source≠ | Swadesh, M. (1955). Towards greater accuracy in lexicostatistic dating. International Journal of American Linguistics, 21(2), 121–137. DOI ↗ | Swadesh, M. (1952). Lexico-statistic dating of prehistoric ethnic contacts. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 96(4), 452–463. link ↗ |
| Aliases | Glottochronology, Lexicostatistic Dating, Linguistic Dating | Lexical Statistics, Basic Vocabulary Comparison, Cognate Percentage Method |
| Related | 4 | 4 |
| Summary≠ | Glottochronology is Morris Swadesh's method for estimating the time depth at which two related languages separated, derived from the proportion of basic-vocabulary cognates they still share. Building directly on lexicostatistics, it adds a crucial extra assumption — a 'glottoclock' — that basic vocabulary is lost at an approximately constant rate over time, analogous to radioactive decay. Plugging the observed cognate proportion into a logarithmic decay formula yields an estimated separation date in years. The method is historically important but has been heavily criticized, and most historical linguists today treat its dates with great caution. | Lexicostatistics is a quantitative method in historical linguistics that gauges how closely two or more languages are genealogically related by measuring the percentage of cognates they share within a fixed list of basic, culture-neutral vocabulary — classically Morris Swadesh's 100- or 200-word list. By converting word comparisons into similarity percentages, it produces a matrix of pairwise scores from which subgroupings within a language family can be inferred. It is the statistical core that underlies glottochronology, but on its own it makes no claim about absolute dates — it speaks only to degree of relatedness. |
| ScholarGateDataset ↗ |
|
|