[3] The project was founded in 2001 by Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann when he partnered with Sergei Starostin and Merritt Ruhlen to map out the evolutionary tree of human languages.
[5] Many of the project's members belong to the Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics, including Georgiy Starostin and Ilia Peiros.
[6] Other project members include Vaclav Blazek, John D. Bengtson, Edward Vajda, and other linguists.
It is coordinated by the Center of Comparative Linguistics [ru] of the Russian State University for the Humanities.
[9] The Global Lexicostatistical Database includes basic word lists of 110 items each for many of the world's languages.