Michael Dunn

I am an evolutionary linguist, with a background in language description, linguistic typology, and phylogenetics. My current research focusses on the evolutionary processes acting within language and culture: their evolutionary history, the evolutionary dependencies between different aspects of language, and the cultural factors which shape the evolution of language. Since the beginning of 2009 I have been the leader of a Max Planck Research Group "Evolutionary Processes in Language and Culture".

I have a long term research interest in linguistic isolates: the Papuan languages of Melanesia and the Paleosiberian languages of the Russian Arctic, but―because of my interest in reconstructing evolutionary processes―now spend more time thinking about language families: Austronesian, Indo-European and Aslian/Austroasiatic.