Around a third of the vocabulary differences between modern Bantu speakers arose this way, around a fifth of the differences between speakers of Indo-European languages, and around a tenth of the Austronesians.

ECONOMIST: Languages and species evolve in surprisingly similar ways

To do so he looked at three well-studied parts of the linguistic family tree: the Bantu languages of Africa, the Indo-European group from Eurasia and the Austronesians of the Pacific.

ECONOMIST: Languages and species evolve in surprisingly similar ways