Unlike synchronic linguists, who can ask their consultants for additional data and examples, historical linguists are, for the most part, stuck with the data we have. Only rarely are we able to add to the corpus of available texts, or find additional examples of a rare combination of phonemes. The problems of historical linguistics are thus inherently probabilistic: we must constantly decide wh...

in rural tanzania, recent major influences happen between kiswahili and english to ethnic languages rather than ethnic languages, which had been in contact for so long, influencing each other. in this work, i report the results of investigation of lexical changes in indigenous languages that aimed at examining how ethnic communities and their languages, namely cushitic iraqw, nilotic datooga, n...

Historical inference is at its most powerful when independent lines of evidence can be integrated into a coherent account. Dating linguistic and cultural lineages can potentially play a vital role in the integration of evidence from linguistics, anthropology, archaeology and genetics. Unfortunately, although the comparative method in historical linguistics can provide a relative chronology, it ...