Journal of The Royal Society Interface ( IF 3.9 ) Pub Date : 2021-08-11 , DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2020.1031 Peter Ranacher 1, 2, 3 , Nico Neureiter 1, 2, 3 , Rik van Gijn 4 , Barbara Sonnenhauser 5 , Anastasia Escher 5 , Robert Weibel 1, 2, 3 , Pieter Muysken 6 , Balthasar Bickel 1, 3, 7
When speakers of different languages interact, they are likely to influence each other: contact leaves traces in the linguistic record, which in turn can reveal geographical areas of past human interaction and migration. However, other factors may contribute to similarities between languages. Inheritance from a shared ancestral language and universal preference for a linguistic property may both overshadow contact signals. How can we find geographical contact areas in language data, while accounting for the confounding effects of inheritance and universal preference? We present