At McElroy, most of us are naturally pretty fascinated by linguistic studies. One such article that caught my eye was recently published in the Guardian.

Professor Robert Foley takes a structural approach to studying how human languages are related. An evolutionary biologist, he is studying the interplay between languages and genetics, and his laboratory is the island of Melanesia.

If you've been taking more long-haul flights, you might even have pondered links between English and Hindi, Persian or Bengali. Or maybe not; although they're all part of the same Indo-European language family, it's hard to imagine they're related. Linguists, however, have long been able to determine when languages are related, even if they sound totally unconnected. But their ability to do so is limited by one important factor: time. "There is a sort of language barrier, around 8,000 years ago," explains Professor Robert Foley, professor of human evolution at the University of Cambridge.

"The classic way to compare languages and determine if they are related to one another is to compare the similarity of words - 'one' in English and 'ein' in German, for example - and linguists have a vast array of techniques to do this. But it's all done with words."

Further information about his project.

Tags: languages | linguistics | words