Is it possible to recreate a language spoken thousands of years ago?

Søren Wichmann,the  world's leading linguist has already been working for more than a year at KFU's Baudouin de Courtenay Research and Education Centre of Linguistics of the Institute of Philology and Intercultural Communication.  

Danish by origin the linguist is a member of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, a qualified specialist in historical linguistics, linguistic topology, and mathematical methods in linguistics. The researcher is studying ancient and modern languages, and Maya hieroglyphs deciphering in particular. In addition, he is the Head of the Quantitative Linguistic OpenLab.

In his interview Mr. Wichmann told us that he investigates fields of language use, what allows concluding how the human history looked like in the past 5000-10000 years. Another interest is linguistic topology. i.e. differences and similarities between completely unlinked languages. Finally, he works on the grammatical des­cription of some languages of Mexico, which are spoken only by few people and therefore are endangered to fall out of use.

For the past 10 years the researcher has been engaged in the implementation of statistical and computational methods into a language study. That is the reason why his colleagues and he created words database containing 7000 language and dialects, which can be used for quantitative history and linguistics analysis.

• Why did you choose this area?
• The first item that attracted me to this area was historical linguistics. When I was 20, as a student I was so intrigued by the fact that I was sitting in my tiny apartment in Copenhagen and trying to recreate the language used 1000 years ago on the other side of the world. I was excited about the opportunity to go places, communicate with locals and study the language that no one has ever studied before.

• Why KFU?
• My first longtime visit to Kazan was last year. I was invited by the Head of Baudouin de Courtenay Research and Education Centre professor Valerii Solovyev. We met long time ago, he visited me at my institute in Leipzig (Germany), and we had some collaboration experience. Since Russia has famous linguistic traditions, I felt that here I would be able to learn a lot. When I came to Kazan I started cooperating with V. Solovyev and his colleague V.Bochkarev of the Institute of Physics.

• What makes OpenLab so special?
• Our lab can invite foreign researchers and is very flexible in terms of engaging various researchers in general.

• How can you evaluate the practical relevance of your contribution?
• Fundamental research is not conducted for the sake of single-instance application. However, sometimes we have unexpected results.  For example in my case: I created a method to measure the “distance” between languages, which is becoming very popular in economics. It turns out that it is possible to predict to a certain extent the grade of trading relations and migrations between countries, depending on how much their primary languages are similar.

• Your H-index equals 13. How did you achieve this high figure?
• One of the reasons why the linguist has such a high H-index is publications in interdisciplinary journals and journals of physics, biology, informatics, anthropology, archaeology and linguistics of course.
  To make my efforts more appreciated I use another “tongue” – the “language” of statistics, numbers and computer models. that's why researchers from other fields of science understand and cite me more frequently than those, who speak “linguistics” only.

• What are the main qualities of a researcher?
• Some traits are quite obvious: curiosity, hard-work and readiness to explore new methods along with constant self-criticism and control. By the way there are sometimes when I question myself if I do the things the right way. Then I ask myself – how much fun do I have while I work? If the answer is “not much”, then most likely there's something not alright. Yet if it's “yes”, then, it's just can't be wrong.