Hannah Haynie

About

Hannah Haynie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder. She earned her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships in Linguistics at Yale University and in Cultural Evolution and Biocultural Diversity at Colorado State University before joining CU. Her research generally focuses on linguistic diversity, language prehistory, and language change, with a particular interest in the languages of North America and the linguistic diversity of the California area. Dr. Haynie's work is driven by an interest in understanding how linguistic diversity arises from processes of language change that operate at multiple spatiotemporal scales, as well as the competing pressures that shape language change and language diversity. With an interdisciplinary background, she integrates linguistic analysis with methodological approaches inspired by geography, ecology, and evolutionary biology to investigate these questions.

Research topics

• Geography
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Linguistics
• Political Science
• Archaeology
• History
• Biology
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss

  Science Advances · 2023 · 119 citations

  While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here, we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on the structural diversity of the world's languages,…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages

  Science Advances · 2023-08-18 · 36 citations

  articleOpen access

  Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The linguistic niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial proportions of nonnative speakers (societies of strangers) tend to lose grammatical distinctions. In contrast, languages in small, isolated communities should maintain or expand their grammatical markers. Here, we test these claims using a global dataset of grammatical structures, Grambank. We model the impact of the number of…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A recent northern origin for the Uto-Aztecan family

  Language · 2023 · 18 citations

  The Uto-Aztecan language family is one of the largest language families in the Americas. However, there has been considerable debate about its origin and how it spread. Here we use Bayesian phylogenetic methods to analyze lexical data from thirty-four Uto-Aztecan varieties and two Kiowa-Tanoan languages. We infer the age of Proto-Uto-Aztecan to be around 4,100 years (3,258–5,025 years) and identify the most likely homeland to be near what is now Southern California. We reconstruct the most proba…

  DOI

• Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2025-11-17 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Human languages show astonishing variety, yet their diversity is constrained by recurring patterns. Linguists have long argued over the extent and causes of these grammatical 'universals'. Using Grambank-a comprehensive database of grammatical features across the world's languages-we tested 191 proposed universals with Bayesian analyses that account for both genealogical descent and geographical proximity. We find statistical support for about a third of the proposed linguistic universals. The m…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Grambank v1.0

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2023-04-19 · 2 citations

  datasetOpen access

  Cite the source of the dataset as: Skirgård, Hedvig and Haynie, Hannah J. and Blasi, Damián E. and Hammarström, Harald and Collins, Jeremy and Latarche, Jay J. and Lesage, Jakob and Weber, Tobias and Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena and Passmore, Sam and Chira, Angela and Maurits, Luke and Dinnage, Russell and Dunn, Michael and Reesink, Ger and Singer, Ruth and Bowern, Claire and Epps, Patience and Hill, Jane and Vesakoski, Outi and Robbeets, Martine and Abbas, Noor Karolin and Auer, Daniel and Bakker…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Simon J. Greenhill

  University of Auckland

  142 shared

• Russell D. Gray

  University of Auckland

  140 shared

• Carlos A. Botero

  123 shared

• Angela M. Chira

  Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

  118 shared

• Lyle Campbell

  112 shared

• Johann‐Mattis List

  112 shared

• Robert M. Ross

  Macquarie University

  76 shared

• Michael C. Gavin

  Colorado State University

  41 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of California, Berkeley

• Other, Linguistics

  Yale University

• Other, Cultural Evolution and Biocultural Diversity

  Colorado State University

Similar researchers at University of Colorado Boulder

• Bhuvana Narasimhanh-29
• Kira Hallh-27
• Alexis Palmerh-21