What to think about the neighbors: Assimilation and dissimilation in language and culture

On every level of language and culture there are contradictory impulses to be more like those we are in contact with, as well as to delimit ourselves from them. Sociolinguistic variation is so tightly integrated into language that communication without this extra layer of social signalling is in practice non-existent. The social signalling aspect to other areas of culture is likewise ubiquitous. In studying variation on the level of community or language group there have been proposals about the factors favoring strengthening ties with neighbors, versus those favoring the strengthening of boundaries. Computational phylogenetic methods have been used to demonstrate punctuation effects in the evolution of languages, showing that language fissions tend to be associated with increased rates of change. We test these proposals quantitatively by investigating the effects of linguistic, cultural and geographic proximity on linguistic and cultural change; factors which predict assimilation or dissimilation in language and culture are identified, as are some of the causes of punctuational change. In the study geographic information and language phylogenies are supplemented with measures of ethnographic difference derived from functionally arbitrary (and potentially emblematic) aspects of culture coded in the SCCS