Olena Shcherbakova

Olena Shcherbakova is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Her work focuses on phylogenetic methods, spatiophylogenetic modeling, and causal inference to study large-scale patterns in language evolution and typological variation. She holds a BA and MA in Philology from the National Technical University of Ukraine (Kyiv Polytechnic Institute) and completed an exchange program at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

Her research explores grammatical complexity dynamics, sociolinguistic influences on language structure, and the evolutionary pathways of gender systems. Key findings include evidence that grammatical complexity (fusion and informativity) is primarily inherited rather than adapting to sociolinguistic changes, and that societies of strangers do not correlate with simpler languages. She has contributed to cross-linguistic studies on argument structure signaling and collaborated on global analyses comparing music and speech acoustics.

Shcherbakova's methods include computational phylogenetics, spatiotemporal modeling, and comparative approaches across language families like Austronesian, Bantu, and Indo-European. She co-developed the CHIELD database for tracking causal hypotheses in evolutionary linguistics and has published in journals such as Science Advances, Journal of Language Evolution, and Scientific Reports.