The Dating Game: One Last Look at Glottochronology: The Case of Some Arabic Dialects

Abstract

In a series of seminal articles, Swadesh (1951, 1955)
and Lees (1953) developed the theories of lexicostatistics
and glottochronology, and detailed the methods for their
application. There followed a spate of enthusiastic
studies to test and refine those methods, discussed by
Hymes (1960) in his lengthy evaluation of the progress of
lexicostatistical theory. At that time, Hymes deemed the
glottochronological method a potentially useful tool for
the dating of language splits, and called for its further
refinement. Yet, since Bergsland and Vogt's (1962)
scathing and cogent critique of the method,
glottochronology has been neglected. Neither defended nor
disproven definitively, glottochronology seems to have died
a silent death. Our purpose in this paper is to resurrect
it once again, to test the method with data from nine
modern dialects of Arabic, to examine the problems involved
in its application, and to scrutinize the assumptions
which underlie the theory.