The Diversity and Evolution of the World's Languages

Asya Pereltsvaig

Monday, 21 Mar 2016 at 8:00 pm – Sun Room, Memorial Union

Linguist Asya Pereltsvaig studies how languages evolve, their commonalities, differences, and what they can tell us about our human past. She received her PhD in Linguistics from McGill University in Montreal and has taught at Yale, Cornell and Stanford, as well as at several European Universities. Her areas of specialization include Slavic languages, syntax and typology, and historical linguistics, and her general academic interests include languages, history and genetics, and the relationship between them. Her most recent book is Languages of the World: An Introduction and The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics, which she coauthored with Martin W. Lewis. Quentin Johnson Lecture in Linguistics

Over 7,000 languages are spoken in the world today. How did this seemingly unbounded variety develop? How do languages evolve, and why do some of them disappear, often without a trace? How can languages spoken today be mined for information about deep human past? What do all human languages have in common and how can we capture the ways in which they differ? And why don't we all speak the same language?

Cosponsored By:

Linguistics Program
Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)

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