How do language families evolve over many thousands of years? How stable over time are structural features of languages? Dan Dediu and Stephen Levinson from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholingustics in Nijmegen introduced a new method using Bayesian phylogenetic approaches to analyse the evolution of structural features in more than 50 language families. Their paper ‘Abstract profiles of structural stability point to universal tendencies, family-specific factors, and ancient connections between languages’ was published online on September 20, 2012 in PLoS ONE.