While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here, we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on the structural diversity of the world's languages, evaluate constraints on linguistic diversity, and identify the world's most unusual languages. An analysis of the consequences of language loss reveals that the reduction in diversity will be strikingly uneven across the major linguistic regions of the world. Without sustained efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages, our linguistic window into human history, cognition, and culture will be seriously fragmented.

Kinship terminologies are the semantic systems of language that express kinship relations between individuals: in English, 'aunt' denotes a parent's sister. Theoretical models of kinship terminology diversity reduce over 10 billion possible organisations to six key types, each of which are hypothesised to be aligned with particular cultural norms of descent, marriage or residence patterns (Murdock, 1949). Often, terminological type is used to infer social patterns in past societies based on these putative relationships between kinship terminologies and social structure, and these associations are staples of 'Anthropology 101'. However, these relationships have not been scrutinised using modern comparative methods. Here we show that kinship terminologies vertically track language phylogeny in Austronesian, Bantu, and Uto-Aztecan, three languages families of different time-depths and environments. We find no unidirectional or universal models of evolution in kinship terminology. Of 18 existing anthropological coevolutionary theories regarding kinship terminology and cultural practices across 176 societies, we find only patchy support, and no evidence for putative universal drivers of evolution in kinship terminologies.

Abstract Objectives The predominance of Bantu languages in sub‐Saharan Africa has sparked a large debate over the processes through which they came to disperse over time and space—the “Bantu expansion.” The overall genetic similarity shown by Bantu‐speaking populations indicates that movement of people occurred too, but the extent of the correlation between genetics, linguistics and geography has been a matter of debate among scholars of different disciplines. In this work, we aim to investigate how genetic, linguistic and geographic distances relate to each other in Bantu‐speaking populations. Methods We analyzed genome‐wide SNP array data from a set of 37 Bantu and non‐Bantu‐speaking populations together with related linguistic and geographic data. Due to the complex demographic relationships resulting from events of admixture in the history of these populations, we develop and implement a method for controlling the signatures of admixture. Results Genetic distances were only minimally correlated with linguistic and geographic distances, possibly as the result of gene flow from neighboring groups into Bantu‐speaking populations. When signatures of admixture are controlled for, the correlation of genetic data with linguistic and geographic distances significantly increases. Discussion The increase of the correlation between linguistic and genetic distances after the signatures of admixture are taken into account is in agreement with a scenario of spatial co‐dispersal of languages and people. Additional specific cultural and demographic dynamics have probably further affected the relationship between language and genetics, which will be necessary to take into account when integrating multidisciplinary data to reconstruct the history of populations.

Understanding the patterns and causes of differential structural stability is an area of major interest for the study of language change and evolution. It is still debated whether structural features have intrinsic stabilities across language families and geographic areas, or if the processes governing their rate of change are completely dependent upon the specific context of a given language or language family. We conducted an extensive literature review and selected seven different approaches to conceptualising and estimating the stability of structural linguistic features, aiming at compari