Frontmatter -- Preface -- Contents -- Introduction -- The why and how of measuring linguistic differences -- Case studies -- Contrasting linguistics and archaeology in the matrix model: GIS and cluster analysis of the Arawakan languages -- Predicting language-learning difficulty -- How aberrant are divergent Indo-European subgroups? -- Measuring socially motivated pronunciation differences -- Distance-based phylogenetic inference algorithms in the subgrouping of Dravidian languages -- Carving Tibeto-Kanauri by its joints: Using basic vocabulary lists for genetic grouping of languages -- The effect of linguistic distance across Indo-European mother tongues on learning Dutch as a second language -- Using semantically restricted word-lists to investigate relationships among Athapaskan languages -- Languages with longer words have more lexical change -- Methods and tools -- The Intercontinental Dictionary Series - a rich and principled database for language comparison -- Towards automated language classification: A clustering approach -- Dependency-sensitive typological distance -- Degrees of semantic control in measuring aggregated lexical distances -- Word similarity, cognation, and translational equivalence -- Comparing linguistic systems of categorisation -- Black box approaches to genealogical classification and their shortcomings -- Semantic typologies by means of network analysis of bilingual dictionaries -- Measuring morphosemantic language distance in parallel texts -- Information-theoretic modeling of etymological sound change -- Index