Recent News
- Successful PhD defense (17.07.2026)
About Me
I am a computational linguist working at the intersection of historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and machine learning, with a focus on developing data-driven methodology to address questions about language change, genealogical classification, and the origins of cross-linguistic variation. A central topic in my research is the development of computational methods for historical linguistics. This includes the automation of traditional approaches as well as the development of methods that go beyond the traditional comparative method. One key area of research involves the genealogical classification of languages and the issue of what counts as proof of genealogical relatedness. I am particularly interested in the history of Amazonian languages, including both reconstructions of language families and their phylogenetic analysis. In linguistic typology, I am interested in the application of Bayesian methodology to study variation in the domains of the lexicon as well as constraints on phonological features in the languages of the world.
Education
| Dates | Affilliation |
|---|---|
| 2026 – | Post-Doc Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology |
| 2022 – 2026 | PhD in Linguistics Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology & University of Passau |
Five Key Publications
Blum, Frederic & Johann-Mattis List. 2026. Using Correspondence Patterns to Identify Irregular Words in Cognate Sets Through Leave-One-Out Validation. In The Proceedings for the 6th International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Language Change (LChange’26), 75–86. Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.lchange-1.6.
Blum, Frederic. 2026. The over-representation of phonological features in basic vocabulary doesn’t replicate when controlling for spatial and phylogenetic effects. Linguistic Typology 30(2). 245–269. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2025-0050.
Blum, Frederic, Carlos Barrientos, Johannes Englisch, Robert Forkel, Simon J. Greenhill, Christoph Rzymski & Johann-Mattis List. 2025. Lexibank 2: pre-computed features for large-scale lexical data. Open Research Europe 5(126). 1–27. https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.20216.2.
Blum, Frederic, Steffen Herbold & Johann-Mattis List. 2025. From isolates to families: Using neural networks for automated language affiliation. In Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova & Mohammad Taher Pilehvar (eds.), Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), 17915–17927. Vienna, Austria: Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.876/.
Blum, Frederic, Ludger Paschen, Robert Forkel, Susanne Fuchs & Frank Seifart. 2024. Consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words across a diverse sample of languages. Nature Human Behaviour 8. 2127–2138. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01988-4.