Since the evolutionary relationships among languages can be seen analogously to the genealogical relationships of different species, phylogenetic models and methods developed originally for biological evolution are increasingly being applied to the reconstruction of past dynamics of language evolution. Namely, approaches utilizing Bayesian inference have become popular techniques to generate binary-branching trees upon linguistic material, such as lexical data. For several language families, these approaches have been utilized to estimate when languages diverged from their common ancestor and the temporal origins of language subgroups.
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