Demonstrates the application of quantitative methods to the elucidation of linguistic prehistory on an world-wide scale, providing insights into issues of the linguistic correlates of subsistence strategies, rates of birth and extinction of languages, lexical borrowability, and development of phylogenetic methods appropriate for linguistic data.

1. Articles / Aufsatze; 2. Swadesh's life and place in linguistics (by Grant, Anthony P.); 3. A full-scale test of the language farming dispersal hypothesis (by Hammarstrom, Harald); 4. Do languages originate and become extinct at constant rates? (by Holman, Eric W.); 5. Borrowability and the notion of basic vocabulary (by Tadmor, Uri); 6. Homelands of the world's language families: A quantitative approach (by Wichmann, Soren); 7. On using qualitative lexicostatistics to illuminate language history: Some techniques and case studies (by Grant, Anthony P.); 8. Beyond lexicostatistics: How to get more out of 'word list' comparisons (by Heggarty, Paul); 9. Phonetic comparison, varieties, and networks: Swadesh's influence lives on here too (by Sullivan, Jennifer); 10. A stochastic local search approach to language tree reconstruction (by Tria, Francesca); 11. Index; 12. Author index; 13. Index of languages and language groups; 14. Subject index