What might migration patterns tell us about how modern languages came about? Vanderbilt University’s Nicole Creanza talks with us about her research into how migration during the colonial era contributed to the development of the creole language, Sranan. Her open-access article “Using features of a Creole language to reconstruct population history and cultural evolution: tracing the English origins of Sranan” was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences on December 27, 2017.

Websites and other resources

• Supplemental materials for the article
• Andre Sherriah’s website
• Hubert Devonish’s website
• Ewart Thomas’ website
• “Inference of population splits and mixtures from genome-wide allele frequency data” (Pickrell and Pritchard article on phylogenetics mentioned in discussion)
• TreeMix software, used in analyses
• What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty (book)

Press coverage

ArsTechnica | Scientific American | Phys.org (a) | Phys.org (b) | The Conversation | Anthropology.net | Vanderbilt News | Futura-Sciences (French)

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