Population Size and Language Change: An Evolutionary Perspective

Abstract

There is increasing interest in the way that the size, composition, and envi- ronment of populations influence the way that their languages evolve. There are two reasons why an exploration of population and language change from the perspective of evolutionary biology might be useful. First, some of the relevant hypotheses rest explicitly or implicitly on theories developed in evo- lutionary biology, so it is important to critically evaluate the fit of these theories to language change. Second, methods developed in evolutionary biology have been applied to evaluating these hypotheses. Instead of aiming for a comprehensive review of the interaction between population size and language change, the focus of this review is on analogies drawn to processes in biological evolution (e.g., founder effects), processes that may have inter- esting parallels in both species and languages (e.g., evolution of complexity in small populations), and techniques from evolutionary biology that have been applied to language data (e.g., Wright-Fisher models). Show more