Linguistic Diversity within Antwerp’s Jewish Community

Across language families: Genome diversity mirrors linguistic variation within Europe

OBJECTIVES The notion that patterns of linguistic and biological variation may cast light on each other and on population histories dates back to Darwin's times; yet, turning this intuition into a proper research program has met with serious methodological difficulties, especially affecting language comparisons. This article takes advantage of two new tools of comparative linguistics: a refined...

The Jewish Community in Contemporary Iran: A New Analytic Approach

This paper takes a broad and novel approach to analysing the Iranian Jewish community of Iran, both as a distinct group and as a constituent part of Iran’s wider population sharing its national culture. The goal was to find a new way of addressing the topic, avoiding many ambiguities, and bringing all discourse back to its starting point: Iranian identity. If we identify Persian roots as the fo...

Linguistic Diversity and Redistribution

This paper investigates the effect of linguistic diversity on redistribution in a broad crosssection of countries. We use the notion of “linguistic distances” and show that the commonly used fractionalization index, which ignores linguistic distances, yields insignificant results. However, once distances between languages are accounted for, linguistic diversity has both a statistically and econ...

Africa's Linguistic Diversity

African language classification in the latter half of the 20th century has been dominated by Joseph Greenberg’s work classifying African languages into four linguistic genetic groupings: Afroasiatic, Niger-Kordofanian, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan. Current research indicates that there are a minimum of 20 unrelated African language families or isolates. Africa’s linguistic diversity will remain po...

Linguistic diversity and universals