Paul Heggarty

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
04103 Leipzig

Tel.: +49 (341) 3550 - 347
Fax: +49 (341) 3550 - 333

  Email: heggarty[>>> Please replace the brackets with an AT sign! <<<]eva.mpg.de

My background is in comparative linguistics, where I have focused on developing new quantitative approaches to language relatedness. Once we can produce meaningful measures of language difference and divergence, they can then be fed into a range of powerful new analytical tools, both statistical and phylogenetic — to represent language relationships either in family trees or (often better) in networks.

I use language data, and these new quantitative and analytical tools, to what is my broader, ultimate research objective: progressing towards a more coherent understanding of human origins, in very close collaboration with the complementary perspectives of archaeology and genetics.

I started at the MPI-EVA in September 2010. My path here began with an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in linguistics, on quantitative approaches to language comparison, completed at the University of Cambridge in 2001 — but not before a year hosted at the nascent MPI-EVA in Leipzig (in its former home on Inselstraße). I have since held research posts at the universities of Sheffield and Edinburgh, and most recently as ‘resident linguist’ at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge.

Interspersed with these years have been a good many others spent learning languages, conducting fieldwork, and trying to understand the (pre)histories of various parts of the world, although two in particular. Across ‘Old Europe’ I focus on the origins of our myriad but fast vanishing regional languages and dialects, and back even to the enigma of Indo-European. Of no less significance to the human story is the other region I focus on:  the independent ‘hearth of civilisation’ of the Andes. It is home too to what is arguably our greatest surviving link to the speech of the entire New World before European conquest, the target of my comparative linguistic research here: the Quechua language family.

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