ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Evolutionary dynamics of language systems.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Disentangling complex language contact and admixture in the broad Gansu-Qinghai region.Fundamental research · 2026Article
- Patterns of genetic admixture reveal similar rates of borrowing across diverse scenarios of language contact.Science advances · 2025Article
- Tracing Human Diversity in South America's Southern Cone: Linguistic, Morphometric, and Genetic Perspectives.American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Article
- Genetic and linguistic comparisons reveal complex sex-biased transmission of language features.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Inferring language dispersal patterns with velocity field estimation.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Grammars Across Time Analyzed (GATA): a dataset of 52 languages.Scientific data · 2023Article
- Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss.Science advances · 2023Article
- Expansion and evolution of the R programming language.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Lexical phylogenetics of the Tupí-Guaraní family: Language, archaeology, and the problem of chronology.PloS one · 2023Article
- Optionality in animal communication: a novel framework for examining the evolution of arbitrariness.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2022Article
- Communicative Efficiency or Iconic Learning: Do Acquisition and Communicative Pressures Interact to Shape Colour- Naming Systems?Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Phylogenetic signal and rate of evolutionary change in language structures.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Do languages and genes share cultural evolutionary history?Science advances · 2021Article
- The uses and abuses of tree thinking in cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Exploring correlations in genetic and cultural variation across language families in northeast Asia.Science advances · 2021Article
- Geospatial distributions reflect temperatures of linguistic features.Science advances · 2021Article
- Quantifying the spatial pattern of dialect words spreading from a central population.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Article
- Formal Syntax and Deep History.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
Understanding how and why language subsystems differ in their evolutionary dynamics is a fundamental question for historical and comparative linguistics. One key dynamic is the rate of language change. While it is commonly thought that the rapid rate of change hampers the reconstruction of deep language relationships beyond 6,000-10,000 y, there are suggestions that grammatical structures might retain more signal over time than other subsystems, such as basic vocabulary. In this study, we use a Dirichlet process mixture model to infer the rates of change in lexical and grammatical data from 81 Austronesian languages. We show that, on average, most grammatical features actually change faster than items of basic vocabulary. The grammatical data show less schismogenesis, higher rates of homoplasy, and more bursts of contact-induced change than the basic vocabulary data. However, there is a core of grammatical and lexical features that are highly stable. These findings suggest that different subsystems of language have differing dynamics and that careful, nuanced models of language change will be needed to extract deeper signal from the noise of parallel evolution, areal readaptation, and contact.
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