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.
Lexicostatistics was developed by Morris Swadesh in a series of articles in the 1950s, based on earlier ideas.
[1][2][3] The concept's first known use was by Dumont d'Urville in 1834 who compared various "Oceanic" languages and proposed a method for calculating a coefficient of relationship.
Various sub-grouping methods can be used but that adopted by Dyen, Kruskal and Black was: Calculations have to be of nucleus and group lexical percentages.
The problem of internal branching within the Pama-Nyungan language family has been a long-standing issue for Australianist linguistics, and general consensus held that internal connections between the 25+ different subgroups of Pama-Nyungan were either impossible to reconstruct or that the subgroups were not in fact genetically related at all.
[12] In 2012, Claire Bowern and Quentin Atkinson published the results from their application of computational phylogenetic methods on 194 doculects representing all major subgroups and isolates of Pama-Nyungan.
[13] Their model "recovered" many of the branches and divisions that had erstwhile been proposed and accepted by many other Australianists, while also providing some insight into the more problematic branches, such as Paman (which is complicated by the lack of data) and Ngumpin-Yapa (where the genetic picture is obscured by very high rates of borrowing between languages).
People such as Hoijer (1956) have showed that there were difficulties in finding equivalents to the meaning items while many have found it necessary to modify Swadesh's lists.
Some of the modern computational statistical hypothesis testing methods can be regarded as improvements of lexicostatistics in that they use similar word lists and distance measures.