This study seeks to evaluate the degree to which classical kinship models are able to capture variation in kinship terminology. Following a description of the classical typologies of kinship, the authors use statistical approaches and a new database, Kinbank, to assess the internal coherence of these typologies; they find that these typologies are not necessarily accurate predictors of kinship terms across cultures. In addition, this analysis showed that the use of one sort of kinship typology for one generation may only weakly indicate its use in an adjacent generation. The authors set out to try and identify new typologies using statistical modeling based on the single-generation kinship terms of 306 languages. They successfully identify 9 clusters of kinship terms for just one generation alone, indicating that kinship terminology is much more diverse than previously thought. They conclude kinship typology and variation in kinship terminology needs to be investigated more thoroughly.

Kinbank is a global database of 210,903 kinship terms derived from 1,229 spoken and signed languages. The authors created Kinbank as a tool to help explain recurring patterns across cultures through kinship terminology. They illustrate its usefulness by addressing two questions as an example: 1) Is there gender bias in the phonological structure of parent terms? and 2) Did bifurcate-merging terminology and cross-cousin marriage co-evolve in Bantu languages? Using a Bayesian phylogenetic approach, the authors find support for the first question, but none for the latter.

Using phylogenetic comparative methods, the study explores the evolution of kinship terminologies within 176 societies in Austronesian, Bantu, and Uto-Aztecan language families. The authors consider 18 theories in the anthropological record that suggests that change in kinship terminologies is predicted by some social structures: marriage, residence, and descent. Only 19 of the 29 statistical hypotheses are supported, while none of the theories are supported in all three language families. This statistical irregularity means that the results are lineage-specific, instead of showing a universal driver of change in kinship terminology types.

Researchers examined kinships terminology systems for explanations regarding specifically observed typology of kin terms for cousins cross-culturally. They explore two theories, the first relating to population size via bottleneck evolution, and the second relating to social practices that shape kinship systems. Using the Ethnographic Atlas within D-PLACE, 936 societies with kinship system information were studied. The findings did not suggest a relationship between increased community size and a decrease in kinship complexity, however the research does suggest a relationship between practices of marriage and descent and kinship complexity.

This study explores the prevalence of group singing and its relationship with changes in social organization's participatory dynamics, precisely community size and social differentiation. The authors use two samples: 1) 5776 audio recordings from 1024 societies and 2) 4709 ethnographic texts from 60 societies. There is significant support that group singing is more prevalent than solo singing. The results also show that community size predicts group singing in only one of the samples (GJB). However, there is no significant support for social differentiation as a predictor of group singing.

Previous research has found that words are replaced faster in language vocabularies the less the word is used, whereas words that are used more frequently endure longer. Drawing from this theory, the authors of this article propose two questions: 1) Is the rate of replacement for Indo-European kinship terms correlated with their usage frequency? 2) How does this relationship differ between kinship terms and core vocabulary? Using phylogenetic comparative methods to analyze 10 kinship categories from 47 Indo-European languages, the authors find that more frequently used kinship terms tend to be replaced at a much slower rate than less frequently used words. Furthermore, this relationship between word replacement rate and usage frequency is stronger for kinship terms than it is for core vocabulary terms.

Is grammatical complexity shaped by sociodemographic and sociolinguistic factors? The previously accepted "linguistic niche hypothesis" claims that with an increased number of nonnative speakers in a social group (high exotericity), grammatic complexity decreases; on the other hand, grammatical complexity increases amongst isolated linguistic communities (low exotericity). Through the use of spatiophylogenetic modelling of 1314 languages, the authors of this study do not find adequate evidence to support the linguistic niche hypothesis. Instead, they suggest that linguistic complexity is better predicted by phylogeny and geographic contiguity.