The Cultural Evolution of Language

Abstract

Language is one of only a handful of human cultural systems that is both unique to our species, and universal. This chapter will focus on the cultural evolution of language, situating this alongside the phylogenetic and developmental timescales which also feed into the evolution of language. The chapter begins by outlining the relationship between the emergence of human language and the language faculty and the more rapid, ongoing processes of language change, which are often framed as predominantly cultural. In particular, previous work has emphasised how these timescales interact, and how cultural factors in particular shape which aspects of language exhibit broad cross-cultural variation or stability. This is followed by detailed evidence for this relationship from three domains, focusing on the role of cultural evolution in language as observed in natural language (both historical corpora and cross linguistic data), the cultural evolution of language in agent-based models, and finally, experimental studies of the cultural evolution of language. We conclude that the study of the cultural evolution of language forms an important data-rich model for the study of the evolution of cultural systems more generally, while also providing key insights into the specific dynamics of this uniquely human behaviour.

Phylogenetic insight into the origin of tones

“…Studying the correlated evolution among linguistic traits is essential for understanding the evolutionary mechanisms underlying language diversity [7]. Explaining tonal origin is an intriguing topic and remains a mid-to long-term goal in studies of language evolution and human cognition.…”

“…These correlated evolutionary processes are generally motivated by human communicative demands and cognitive development [1,[4][5][6] and shape the structural diversity of languages. Understanding the diversity of linguistic structures and the driving forces of their evolution would provide important insights into language evolution [7]. Worldwide, spoken languages vary considerably in the structures of sound inventories.…”

Why do languages tolerate heterography? An experimental investigation into the emergence of informative orthography

“…It has been demonstrated in a wide variety of studies that, after several generations of cultural transmission, artificial languages can gradually adapt to the biases of the human learners and the environments in which they are used, yielding emergent linguistic phenomena, such as compositionality (Beckner et al, 2017; Kirby et al, 2008; Kirby et al, 2015, combinatoriality (Verhoef et al, 2015), semantic category structure (Canini et al, 2014; Carr et al, 2017; Silvey et al, 2019, regularization (Smith & Wonnacott, 2010), and argument marking (Motamedi et al, 2021), among many other things. For reviews, see Bailes and Cuskley (2023), Kirby (2017), Kirby et al (2014), Smith (2022), andTamariz (2017). Kirby et al (2008) described the first experimental application of the iterated learning framework (which had previously been confined to computational modeling), showing that compositional structure-a systematic relationship between recombinant linguistic units and meaningcould spontaneously emerge under a bottleneck on transmission.…”