Phonological distances for linguistic typology and the origin of Indo-European languages
We show that short-range phoneme dependencies encode large-scale patterns of linguistic relatedness, with direct implications for quantitative typology and evolutionary linguistics. Specifically, using an information-theoretic framework, we argue that phoneme sequences modeled as second-order Markov chains essentially capture the statistical correlations of a phonological system. This finding enables us to quantify distances among 67 modern languages from a multilingual parallel corpus employing a distance metric that incorporates articulatory features of phonemes. The resulting phonological distance matrix recovers major language families and reveals signatures of contact-induced converg...
| Authors | Marius Mavridis, Juan De Gregorio, Raul Toral et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 April 2026 |
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