Download or read book Language Classification by Numbers written by April McMahon and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2005-11-24 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers how languages have traditionally been divided into families, and asks how they should be classified in the future. It tests current theories and hypotheses, shows how new ideas can be formulated, and offers a series of demonstrations that the new techniques applied to old data can produce convincing results. It will be of great practical interest to all those concerned with the classification and diffusion of languages in fields such as comparative linguistics,archaeology, genetics, and anthropology.