Table 1.

Average±standard deviations of lexical replacement rates for the fundamental vocabulary items and for the low-limit number words, and half lives for the fundamental vocabulary.

replacement rate, per annum	Indo-European (n=200 words)	Bantu (n=102 words)	Austronesian (n=154 words)
overall	0.00020 ± 0.00011	0.00023 ± 0.00009	0.00035 ± 0.00012
fastest, slowest, ratio (f/s)	0.00061, 0.0000047, 130	0.00045, 0.000026, 17	0.00065, 0.000065, 10
half-life, years: average, shortest, longest	3465, 1066, 147 000	3150, 1540, 26 659	1980, 1066, 10 582
‘low-limit’ number words (one to five)exclude one	0.00001 ± 0.00004 (p < 0.0001)	0.00011 ± 0.00009 (p < 0.003)	0.00016 ± 0.00005 (p < 0.0001)
		0.00006 ± 0.00003 (p < 0.00003)	0.00010 ± 0.0.00005 (p < 0.0001)