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

Since the close relationship of North and West Germanic languages was first postulated, the way we view the internal hierarchy of the Germanic languages has more or less remained the same. It seemed that all relevant languages were considered and their interdependencies and genetic relationships were best described by the standard tree model that incorporates Northwest and East Germanic, the former further branching into North and West Germanic later on, often while disregarding the smaller, less well-attested languages. This confidence, however, was always accompanied by a distinct skepticism of the tree model as an adequate heuristic to describe the processes leading up to the early Germanic languages. The underlying linguistic and social mechanics necessary to be best approximated by such a model are unlikely to occur in reality. Tree models, in general, require 'hard' splits where two languages simultaneously break off from a common proto-language with little to no later mutual influence. Slower dissolution processes found in dialect continua in which asynchronous diverging and converging movements of related speech communities occur at varying speeds can hardly be accounted for by tree models. Subsequently, several counter-proposals have been suggested by scholars throughout the debate that seem to better capture these observable mechanisms of proto-language dissolution. However, regardless of prominence, none of these proposals ranging from wave theories and areal change radiation to glottometrics could yet fully account for the linguistic data at hand.In an attempt to approach cladistics from a computational angle, new methods have been adopted in recent years from sciences such as biology. These approaches, phylogenetics in particular, brought new methods and techniques to test previous assumptions against the results obtained through these models. In the case of Germanic, previous studies were either carried out with a larger scope, such as the entire Indo-European family, or were smaller case studies. The aim of our project will therefore be to apply known computational methods specifically to Germanic with a particular focus on a wide range of languages in addition to the well-attested ones. Yet since even these methods do not approximate the data in the best possible way as they often also assume a tree shape dissolution, the ultimate goal will be to program a new model for this task that not only accounts for different speeds of change and incorporates less well-attested languages but is also capable of simulating dialect continua as well as rapid migration movements. The technique we intend to use for this simulation task is the method of agent-based modeling which is currently almost exclusively known from studies in political and social sciences as well as economics. The agent-based models exactly allow the fine-tuned specialization needed to program the best-possible model for the dissolution of Germanic unity.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants