Linguistic Diversity: Empirical Perspectives

When comparing the more than 7000 human language varieties spoken today, one encounters a huge diversity in all domains of language, ranging from phonology via morphology up to syntax and pragmatics. In the seminar, we explored how language diversity can be studied empirically. In order to do so, we looked at linguistic approaches to the study of linguistic diversity from multiple perspectives, including classical approaches in historical and areal linguistics and linguistic typology, as well as recent, predominantly quantitative approaches in the field of diversity linguistics. In terms of topics, we focused on the major domains of language, such as phonology, morphology, and structure ("grammar" in a broad sense).