New Preprint

Yesterday, a new preprint appeared, which was submitted to a new open access journal with post-publication peer review. The study, together with Robert Forkel, proposes a new method for the automated detection of borrowings in multi-lingual wordlists (DOI: 10.12688/openreseurope.13843.1).

Although lexical borrowing is an important aspect of language evolution, there have been few attempts to automate the identification of borrowings in lexical datasets. Moreover, none of the solutions which have been proposed so far identify borrowings across multiple languages. This study proposes a new method for the task and tests it on a newly compiled large comparative dataset of 48 South-East Asian languages. The method yields very promising results, while it is conceptually straightforward and easy to apply. This makes the approach a perfect candidate for computer-assisted exploratory studies on lexical borrowing in contact areas.