  To facilitate the testing of models for the evolution of languages, the
present note offers a set of linguistic features that are approximately
independent of each other. To find these features, the adjusted Rand index R'
is used to estimate the degree of pairwise relationship among 130 linguistic
features in a large published database. Many of the R' values prove to be near
0, as predicted for independent features, and a subset of 47 features is found
with an average R' of -0.0001. These 47 features are recommended for use in
statistical tests that require independent units of analysis.
