ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Rate of language evolution is affected by population size.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed.
- Swearing as a catalyst of technological development.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Islands are engines of language diversity.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Cultural transmission, networks, and clusters among Austronesian-speaking peoples.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Investigating environmental effects on phonology using diachronic models.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Languages with more speakers tend to be harder to (machine-)learn.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Language: Its Origin and Ongoing Evolution.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Review
- Efficiency fosters cumulative culture across species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Long-term gene-culture coevolution and the human evolutionary transition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Review
- A manifesto for palaeodemography in the twenty-first century.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- How individuals change language.PloS one · 2021Article
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- Social Practice and Shared History, Not Social Scale, Structure Cross-Cultural Complexity in Kinship Systems.Topics in cognitive science · 2020Article
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- Coding culture: challenges and recommendations for comparative cultural databases.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Article
- The ecological drivers of variation in global language diversity.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Drivers of geographical patterns of North American language diversity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Eliciting Big Data From Small, Young, or Non-standard Languages: 10 Experimental Challenges.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Article
- Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, advancing data sharing and re-use in comparative linguistics.Scientific data · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The effect of population size on patterns and rates of language evolution is controversial. Do languages with larger speaker populations change faster due to a greater capacity for innovation, or do smaller populations change faster due to more efficient diffusion of innovations? Do smaller populations suffer greater loss of language elements through founder effects or drift, or do languages with more speakers lose features due to a process of simplification? Revealing the influence of population size on the tempo and mode of language evolution not only will clarify underlying mechanisms of language change but also has practical implications for the way that language data are used to reconstruct the history of human cultures. Here, we provide, to our knowledge, the first empirical, statistically robust test of the influence of population size on rates of language evolution, controlling for the evolutionary history of the populations and formally comparing the fit of different models of language evolution. We compare rates of gain and loss of cognate words for basic vocabulary in Polynesian languages, an ideal test case with a well-defined history. We demonstrate that larger populations have higher rates of gain of new words whereas smaller populations have higher rates of word loss. These results show that demographic factors can influence rates of language evolution and that rates of gain and loss are affected differently. These findings are strikingly consistent with general predictions of evolutionary models.
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