Russell Gray

Department of Psychology, University of Auckland

<rd.gray@auckland.ac.nz>

Simon Greenhill

Dept. of Computer Science, University of Auckland

<s.greenhill@auckland.ac.nz>

Paul Sidwell

Centre for Research in Computational Linguistics

<paulsidwell@yahoo.com>

What can Bayesian phylogenetic methods reveal about Austroasiatic languages?

Computational methods derived from evolutionary biology have recently been used to illuminate long-standing debates on issues such as the age of Indo-European languages and the peopling of the Pacific. In this talk we will briefly outline Bayesian phylogenetic methods and report the results of some preliminary analyses of Austroasiatic basic vocabulary.