ArticleBioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology2014
Networks of lexical borrowing and lateral gene transfer in language and genome evolution.
Article in BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- What did the dove sing to Pope Gregory? Ancestral melody reconstruction in Gregorian chant using Bayesian phylogenetics.PloS one · 2026Article
- Automated identification of borrowings in multilingual wordlists.Open research Europe · 2021Article
- Article
- Population Size and the Rate of Language Evolution: A Test Across Indo-European, Austronesian, and Bantu Languages.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Using hybridization networks to retrace the evolution of Indo-European languages.BMC evolutionary biology · 2016Article
- Unity and disunity in evolutionary sciences: process-based analogies open common research avenues for biology and linguistics.Biology direct · 2016Review
- Article
- Support for linguistic macrofamilies from weighted sequence alignment.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Like biological species, languages change over time. As noted by Darwin, there are many parallels between language evolution and biological evolution. Insights into these parallels have also undergone change in the past 150 years. Just like genes, words change over time, and language evolution can be likened to genome evolution accordingly, but what kind of evolution? There are fundamental differences between eukaryotic and prokaryotic evolution. In the former, natural variation entails the gradual accumulation of minor mutations in alleles. In the latter, lateral gene transfer is an integral mechanism of natural variation. The study of language evolution using biological methods has attracted much interest of late, most approaches focusing on language tree construction. These approaches may underestimate the important role that borrowing plays in language evolution. Network approaches that were originally designed to study lateral gene transfer may provide more realistic insights into the complexities of language evolution.
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Registered trials
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