Glottochronology Method

Glottochronology is a method that uses mathematical formula for estimating the amount of time that has passed since two languages develop from ancestral tongue.

This involves counting the number of similar or cognate words and applying the formula to estimate the rate at which such words could be expected to change.

Glottochronology is coming from two Greek words, glotta, meaning “tongue” and chronos, meaning “time.”

Glottochronology is possible because there are a number of things for which all languages have words, for example, certain colors, aspects of the physical envelopment, qualities of objects such as hot or cold, and so on.

Because this is so, we can usually find words with roughly the same meaning in different languages, whether they are related languages or not.

The task then becomes one of making a list of words from one language and seeking cognates in another.

Such lists need not be long; they rarely contain more than 200 items. The next task is to determine the number of words that cognates, that is, the number of words similar in meaning and in the ways they sound.

Using a formula developed by the anthropological linguist Morris Swadesh, we can estimate that on the average a single language will lose or change about 19% of its basic words every 1000 years, or put it another way , it will keep about 81%.
Glottochronology Method