The Transmission, Infection, Diversification & Evolution Group (tide) led by Denise Kühnert is offering a Postdoctoral position for its project:
The "phylodynamics" of language evolution.
There is evidence of infectious diseases having had major effects on the course of history, mostly by directly diminishing population sizes or by causing people to flee from disease. For example, the expansion of Austronesian languages into Remote Oceania has been theorized to have been pushed by one of the plasmodia causing malaria infection. Testing such theories requires both an understanding of the past pathogen dynamics and the cultural and linguistic evolution. The field of phylolinguistics has so far mainly been using methods that were developed for viruses or other pathogens.
The initial aim of this interdisciplinary project is to develop, test and employ mathematical concepts to describe the tree-generating processes appropriate for language evolution. They will be based on birth-death processes, which are suitable to model language evolution as they can incorporate periods of constant growth or decline, stagnation, but also bursts and extinction events.
This project will be performed in close collaboration with the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, led by Professor Dr. Russell Gray.
Your tasks:
- Development of birth-death process based methods for the reconstruction of language phylogenies in a Bayesian framework.
- Analysis of language families, such as the Austronesian and Austroasiatic language families, to test hypotheses about their origins and historic development.
- Test dependence of language diversification on demographic dynamics and potential links to ancient infectious disease outbreaks.
Your qualifications:
- Have or are about to obtain a PhD degree in Linguistics or a quantitative discipline such as Computational Biology, Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, Physics.
- Interest in language evolution
- Experience with phylogenetic methods
- Experience in programming
- Proficient English skills
The overarching goal of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History is to explore the history of humans using state-of-the-art analytical methods. Scientists from different disciplines, such as genetics, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and history are working together to answer fundamental questions about the biological and cultural evolution of man from the paleolithic until today, and they jointly develop innovative methods, in particular in the areas of genome sequencing, language documentation, bioinformatics and phylogeography.
We offer an interesting and responsible job in a competitive, dynamic and stimulating international research environment. The Postdoc position is for 2 years with the possibility of extension. Remuneration will follow the public service pay scale (TVöD), according to qualification and experience. In addition, social benefits are paid according to the regulations of the Civil Service.
The Max Planck Society is committed to employing more handicapped individuals and especially encourages them to apply. The Max Planck Society seeks to increase the number of women in areas where they are underrepresented and therefore explicitly encourages women to apply.
This opportunity has expired. It was originally available here:
https://www.shh.mpg.de/1365926/tide-postdoc-phylodynamics-of-language-evolution
but the link is no more active