Model choice allows  incorporation of realistic assumptions about the processes of language change, including geography, demography, cultural variation, and contact. Bayesian methods in general are valuable whenever there is a need to extract information from data that are uncertain or subject to any kind of error or noise, including measurement error and experimental error, as well as noise or random variation intrinsic to language/cultural systems. Bayesian phylogenetic inference allows quantification of uncertainty and the investigation of conflicting phylogenetic signals, as well as estimation of chronology.