Editing Lexicostatistics (section)

{{Short description|Method of comparative linguistics}}
{{more footnotes|date=August 2014}}
'''Lexicostatistics''' is a method of [[comparative linguistics]] that involves comparing the percentage of [[lexical cognates]] between languages to determine their relationship. Lexicostatistics is related to the [[comparative method]] but does not reconstruct a [[proto-language]]. It is to be distinguished from [[glottochronology]], which attempts to use lexicostatistical methods to estimate the length of time since two or more languages diverged from a common earlier proto-language. This is merely one application of lexicostatistics, however; other applications of it may not share the assumption of a constant rate of change for basic lexical items.

The term "lexicostatistics" is misleading in that mathematical equations are used but not statistics. Other features of a language may be used other than the lexicon, though this is unusual. Whereas the comparative method used shared identified innovations to determine sub-groups, lexicostatistics does not identify these. Lexicostatistics is a distance-based method, whereas the comparative method considers language characters directly. The lexicostatistics method is a simple and fast technique relative to the comparative method but has limitations (discussed below). It can be validated by cross-checking the trees produced by both methods.