Computational Phylogenetics and the Classification of South American Languages

In recent years, South Americanist linguists have embraced computational phylogenetic methods to resolve the numerous outstanding questions about the genealogical relationships among the languages of the continent. We provide a critical review of the methods and language classification results that have accumulated thus far, emphasizing the superiority of character-based methods over distance-based ones, and the importance of developing adequate comparative datasets for producing well-resolved classifications.