Abstract
Human languages evolve by a process of descent with modification in which parent languages give rise to daughter languages over time and in a manner that mimics the evolution of biological species. Descent with modification is just one of many parallels between biological and linguistic evolution that, taken together, offer up a Darwinian perspective on how languages evolve. Combined with statistical methods borrowed from evolutionary biology, this Darwinian perspective has brought new opportunities to the study of the evolution of human languages. These include the statistical inference of phylogenetic trees of languages, the study of how linguistic traits evolve over thousands of years of language change, the reconstruction of ancestral or proto-languages, and using language change to date historical events.
Highlights
Human languages evolve by a process of descent with modification in which parent languages give rise to daughter languages over time and in a manner that mimics the evolution of biological species
The similarities between these two systems of inheritance raises the possibility that we can import to the study of languages ideas, approaches, and methodologies originally developed to investigate genetic systems—a prospect that has been fulfilled: In recent years a field of phylogenetic and comparative studies of how languages evolve has grown up around ideas and methodologies adapted from evolutionary biology and statistics (Pagel, 2009)
In the last 10 to 20 years, the increasing use of evolutionary perspectives in combination with phylogenetic-statistical methods is documenting patterns in the evolution of languages, words and sound systems that are consistent with language adapting to the minds and habits of its speakers (Christiansen & Chater, 2008)
Summary
Linguists have known from at least the late 18th century (Jones, 1824) that languages evolve from earlier ancestral languages, eventually giving rise to family trees or what biologists call phylogenies of related contemporary languages
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