Eric W. Holman Søren Wichmann Cecil H. Brown Viveka Velupillai !"#"$ % André Müller & Dik Bakker ’’ An earlier paper, to which some authors of the present paper have contributed (Brown et al., 2008), describes a method for automating language classification based on the 100,item referent list of Swadesh (1955). Here we discuss a refinement of the method, involving calculation of relative stabilities of list items and reduction of the list to a shorter one by eliminating least stable items. The result is a 40,item referent list. The method for determining stabilities is explained, as well as a method for comparing the classificatory performance of different,sized reduced lists with that of the full 100,item list. A statistical investigation of the relationship of lexical similarity of languages to their geographical proximity is presented. Finally, we test the possibility that