How do we use language? Shared patterns in the frequency of word use across 17 world languages

Abstract

We present data from 17 languages on the frequency with which a common set of words is used in everyday language. The languages are drawn from six language families representing 65 per cent of the world's 7000 languages. Our data were collected from linguistic corpora that record frequencies of use for the 200 meanings in the widely used Swadesh fundamental vocabulary. Our interest is to assess evidence for shared patterns of language use around the world, and for the relationship of language use to rates of lexical replacement, defined as the replacement of a word by a new unrelated or non-cognate word. Frequencies of use for words in the Swadesh list range from just a few per million words of speech to 191 000 or more. The average inter-correlation among languages in the frequency of use across the 200 words is 0.73 (p , 0.0001). The first principal component of these data accounts for 70 per cent of the variance in frequency of use. Elsewhere, we have shown that frequently used words in the Indo-European languages tend to be more conserved, and that this relationship holds separately for different parts of speech. A regression model combining the principal factor loadings derived from the worldwide sample along with their part of speech predicts 46 per cent of the variance in the rates of lexical replacement in the Indo-European languages. This suggests that Indo-European lexical replacement rates might be broadly representative of worldwide rates of change. Evidence for this speculation comes from using the same factor loadings and part-of-speech categories to predict a word's position in a list of 110 words ranked from slowest to most rapidly evolving among 14 of the world's language families. This regression model accounts for 30 per cent of the variance. Our results point to a remarkable regularity in the way that human speakers use language, and hint that the words for a shared set of meanings have been slowly evolving and others more rapidly evolving throughout human history.

Mode and tempo in the evolution of socio-political organization: reconciling ‘Darwinian’ and ‘Spencerian’ evolutionary approaches in anthropology

“…This highlights the fact that a Darwinian view of evolution does not require an adherence to the idea that evolutionary change is always a continuous, gradual process. Indeed, investigating the rate at which evolution proceeds, and how it can vary over time or across different traits, is important for both biological and cultural phenomena [27,28]. The co-evolutionary techniques we have outlined will be applied to test the extent to which other social and cultural features (such as those described in §2c) evolve in a correlated fashion.…”

“…Recently, researchers interested in cultural evolution have begun to apply phylogenetic methods, originally developed in Evolutionary Biology, to empirically investigate questions relating to the pattern and process of human cultural evolution within a Darwinian framework [5]. These techniques have been used to address questions about general evolutionary processes such as whether rates of linguistic change are linked to such factors as the frequency with which words are used [27], as well more specific questions relating to the longue durée of human history such as the dispersal and diversification of widespread language families [28], the ancestral forms of residence practices in South-East Asia and the Pacific [26], and the adoption of cattle and changes in inheritance systems in sub-Saharan Africa [29]. In this paper, we show how a particular type of phylogenetic analysis, Phylogenetic Comparative Methods (PCMs) [5], can be used to test hypotheses relating to three aspects of socio-political evolution that have been key features of Spencerian hypotheses, but which have often been questioned: (i) the sequence of evolution of human groups (do changes in political organization follow a regular sequence?…”

Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia

“…A vocabulary item's generalized frequency-ofuse is calculated as the logarithm of its mean frequency in 17 languages from six language families, plus Basque and the Creole Tok Pisin (16). This measure correlates 0.99 with the first principal component of these same frequencies (16).…”

“…We showed in a sample of IndoEuropean languages that the frequency with which a word is used in everyday speech, along with its part of speech, can predict how rapidly words evolve, with frequently used words on average retained for longer periods of time (14). We have recently extended this result to include speakers from the Uralic, Sino-Tibetan, NigerCongo, Altaic, and Austronesian families, in addition to IndoEuropean, plus the isolate Basque and the Creole Tok Pisin (16). Even in languages as widely divergent as these, we found that a measure of the average frequency of use predicted rates of lexical replacement as estimated in the Indo-European languages.…”

Culture evolves

“…A different, but equally weighty numerical analysis is offered for another aspect of language evolution by Calude & Pagel [34]. In the evolution of lexicons, some classes of word meanings are replaced by new word-forms relatively rapidly, while others have lives up to a hundredfold longer.…”