I am a senior researcher in the Department of Comparative Language Science at the University of Zurich, where I lead the Quantitative Diachronic Linguistics group and am Principal Investigator of the Swiss National Science Foundation grant “Evolving Paradigms: Quantitative and Computational Approaches to Analogical Change.”

Broadly speaking, my research interests revolve around language change. I am interested in the pressures that interact to shape the synchronic profiles of languages, and use a wide range of tools in my approach to these issues. My research program is twofold: on one hand, I ask how we can refine our understanding of relatedness among languages, using tools from computational biology, deep learning, and other probabilistically oriented fields. Second, with representations of phylogenetic relatedness in hand, I attempt to learn more about the dynamics of language change across linguistic features and across different sociolinguistic, environmental and cultural milieux. A large part of my work involves developing probabilistic models that flexible enough to address a wide range of questions of interest to diachronic linguists and linguists more generally.

Code related to various projects I am working on can be found at my GitHub page, and I can be reached via email at firstname dot lastname at uzh.ch.

2023. Rate variation in language change: toward distributional phylogenetic modeling. In Alexandros Karakostis and Gerhard Jäger (eds.), Biocultural Implications: An Agenda for Integrative Approaches, pp. 179-202. Tübingen: Kerns.

2023. Paradigmatic heterogeneity and homogenization: probing Paul's principle. In Alan C.L. Yu and Darya Kavitskaya (eds.), Life Cycle of Language: Past, Present, and Future, pp. 371-385. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2023. Borja Herce and Chundra Cathcart. Short vs long stem alternations in Romance verbal inflection: the S-morphome. Transactions of the Philological Society 00:1–30.

2023. The evolution of similarity avoidance: a phylogenetic approach to phonotactic change. In Noah Elkins, Bruce Hayes, Jinyoung Jo and Jian-Leat Siah (eds.), Proceedings of the 2022 Annual Meeting on Phonology, 12 pp. Linguistic Society of America.

2022. Chundra Cathcart, Borja Herce and Balthasar Bickel. Decoupling speed of change and long-term preference in language evolution: insights from Romance verb stem alternations. In Andrea Ravignani et al. (eds.), The evolution of language: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE), Nijmegen, pp. 101–108. Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE).

2022. Dialectal Layers in West Iranian: a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Approach to Linguistic Relationships. Transactions of the Philological Society 120(1):1--31.

2022. Gerd Carling, Chundra Cathcart and Erich Round. Reconstructing the origins of language families and variation. In Andrew Lock, Chris Sinha, and Nathalie Gontier (eds.), Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution. Oxford University Press.

2021. Gerd Carling and Chundra Cathcart. Reconstructing the evolution of Indo-European grammar. Language 97:1–38.

2021. Gerd Carling and Chundra Cathcart. Evolutionary dynamics of Indo-European alignment patterns. Diachronica 38:358–412.

2020. Chundra Cathcart, Andreas Hölzl, Gerhard Jäger, Paul Widmer and Balthasar Bickel. Numeral classifiers and number marking in Indo-Iranian: a phylogenetic approach. Language Dynamics and Change 11:273–325.

2020. Chundra Cathcart and Taraka Rama. Disentangling dialects: a neural approach to Indo-Aryan historical phonology and subgrouping. In Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pp. 620–630. Association for Computational Linguistics.

2020. A probabilistic assessment of the Indo-Aryan Inner-Outer Hypothesis. Journal of Historical Linguistics 10:42–86. (Preprint)

2020. Chundra Cathcart and Joanne Yager. Linguistic stability and change under small-scale egalitarian language contact: a mixture model approach. In Denison., M. Mack, Y. Xu, & B.C. Armstrong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 42th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 3109–3115. Cognitive Science Society.

2020. Chundra Cathcart and Florian Wandl. In search of isoglosses: continuous and discrete language embeddings in Slavic historical phonology. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, pp. 233–244.

2019. Gaussian Process Models of Sound Change in Indo-Aryan Dialectology. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pp. 254–264.

2019. Toward a deep dialectological representation of Indo-Aryan. In Proceedings of VarDial, pp. 110–119.

2018. Modeling linguistic evolution: a look under the hood. Linguistics Vanguard.

2018. Chundra Cathcart, Gerd Carling, Filip Larsson, Niklas Johansson and Erich Round. Areal pressure in grammatical evolution: An Indo-European case study. Diachronica 35:1–34.

2017. Decomposability and Frequency in the Hindi/Urdu Number System. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. 1733–1738.

2015. Degrees of irregular change: phonological reduction and grammatical convergence in West Iranian. Language Dynamics and Change 5.2:282–308.

2015. William Chang, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall and Andrew Garrett. Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis. Language 91.1:194–244. Reprinted in The Best of Language: Volume III.