Jones, Caroline and Laffan, Shawn, 2008, Lexical similarity and
endemism in historical wordlists of Australian Aboriginal
languages of the greater Sydney region, Transactions of the
Philological Society, 106(3), 456-486. To reconstruct an
indigenous language known solely from historical wordlists, the
linguist needs to decide which source wordlists are most
relevant, i.e. which sources are most likely to be attestations
of the language to be reconstructed. There is little published
research on methods appropriate to this task, and yet there is
increasing attention to indigenous language reconstruction in
support of language revival and revitalisation in education and
community contexts. This paper describes a replicable and
relatively objective method for comparing lexical similarity
within a set of historical sources. The method described draws
on the use of measures of lexical similarity in linguistics and
the use of measures of endemism in biogeography. The method is
illustrated via an analysis of historic