Linguistic Diversity
Abstract
There are some 6,500 different languages in the world, belonging to around 250 distinct families and conforming to numerous grammatical types. This book explains why. Given that the biological mechanisms underlying language are the same in all normal human beings, would we not be a more successful species if we spoke one language? Daniel Nettle considers how this extraordinary and rich diversity arose, how it relates to the nature of language, cognition, and culture, and how it is linked with the main patterns of human geography and history. Human languages and language families are not distributed evenly: there are relatively few in Eurasia compared to the profusion found in Australasia, the Pacific, and the Americas. There is also a marked correlation between biodiversity and linguistic diversity. The author explains the processes by which this distribution evolved and changes still. To do so he returns to the earliest origins of language, reconstructing the processes of linguistic variation and diffusion that occurred when humans first filled the continents and, thousands of years later, turned to agriculture. He ends by examining the causes of linguistic mortality, and why the number of the world's languages may halve before 2100. Linguistic Diversity draws on work in anthropology, linguistics, geography, archaeology, and evolutionary science to provide a comprehensive account of the patterns of linguistic diversity. It is written in a clear, lively and accessible style, and will appeal broadly across the natural and human sciences, as well as to the informed general reader.
... In Model 4, 'blue-most,' greenbeards had a five times higher chance of adopting traits 6 and 7 (that is, the green traits closest to blue on in Fig 1), which reflected a circumstance where, in the absence of between-group competition, functional selection [84] might drive the 'esh' phoneme used in greenbeard populations to be less extreme (ie, more like 's'). Furthermore, the greenbeard group paid twice as high a population-level cost when any bluebeard passed a mimicry test (cost / 5 for the whole greenbeard group) (Five kept the majority of greenbeards with traits 6 and 7 with a minority (~5 where N = 50) of stricter greenbeards with traits 8-10. ...
... Furthermore, the greenbeard group paid twice as high a population-level cost when any bluebeard passed a mimicry test (cost / 5 for the whole greenbeard group) (Five kept the majority of greenbeards with traits 6 and 7 with a minority (~5 where N = 50) of stricter greenbeards with traits 8-10. Again, this reflected the notion that where there is not a strong cultural selection pressure, cultural traits (specifically, phonemes) are likely to be weaker signals (for a detailed discussion, see [84] on functional selection). Greenbeards play twice the value of cost to emphasize the importance of within-group enforcement mechanisms as according to cultural group selection theory (see, for example, [12]); we reduced tolerance to 0 to indicate that, again following cultural group selection theory, a subset of in-group members are likely to pay a significant cost to maintain within-group homogeneity in cultural traits). ...
... Regardless of whether the costs of being detected are high, selection may favour a high average sensitivity to mimicry within groups, such that markers of in-group affiliation are unlikely to be conventional signals, and will therefore be difficult to fake. This has implications for the selection pressures (eg, social and functional; see [84]) on linguistic variables used within groups. Future research should focus specifically on whether the interplay between cost and detection risk affects the rate of change of these cultural traits. ...
Mimicry is an essential strategy for exploiting competitors in competitive co-evolutionary relationships. Protection against mimicry may, furthermore, be a driving force in human linguistic diversity: the potential harm caused by failing to detect mimicked group-identity signals may select for high sensitivity to mimicry of honest group members. Here we describe the results of five agent-based models that simulate multi-generational interactions between two groups of individuals: original members of a group with an honest identity signal, and members of an outsider group who mimic that signal, aiming to pass as members of the in-group. The models correspond to the Biblical story of Shibboleth, where a tribe in conflict with another determines tribe affiliation by asking individuals to pronounce the word, ‘Shibboleth.’ In the story, failure to reproduce the word phonetically resulted in death. Here, we run five different versions of a ‘Shibboleth’ model: a first, simple version, which evaluates whether a composite variable of mimicry quality and detection quality is a superior predictor to the model’s outcome than is cost of detection. The models thereafter evaluate variations on the simple model, incorporating group-level behaviours such as altruistic punishment. Our results suggest that group members’ sensitivity to mimicry of the Shibboleth-signal is a better predictor of whether any signal of group identity goes into fixation in the overall population than is the cost of mimicry detection. Thus, the likelihood of being detected as a mimic may be more important than the costs imposed on mimics who are detected. This suggests that theoretical models in biology should place greater emphasis on the likelihood of detection, which does not explicitly entail costs, rather than on the costs to individuals who are detected. From a language learning perspective, the results suggest that admission to group membership through linguistic signals is powered by the ability to imitate and evade detection as an outsider by existing group members.
... Linguistic richness, defined as the number of languages, is not evenly distributed on Earth [1,2], with the majority of the language-rich countries situated in the tropics (e.g., [3]). Likewise, the number of speakers is not evenly distributed among languages; some languages have hundreds of millions of speakers while others only a few [4]. ...
... Obviously, contingent historical events determine the richness of languages but environmental factors are also likely to play a key role. According to Nettle [1], language richness is a function of the ecological risk, especially is non-industrial societies. By ecological risk it is meant the degree by which human populations are exposed to the vagaries of their natural environment. ...
... Therefore, the higher the ecological risk the smaller the number of languages. In order to measure ecological risk, Nettle [1] used the mean growing season, defined as the number of months in which the monthly rainfall (in millimeters) is greater than twice the monthly temperature ([1], p. 82). Although we acknowledge that this is a very simple measure of ecological risk, of the environmental determinants of linguistic diversity (but see, [18][19][20], we will use it as a first approximation to guarantee relatively homogeneous regional units. ...
Credible estimates suggest that a large number of the nearly 7000 languages in the world could go extinct this century, a prospect with profound cultural, socioeconomic, and political ramifications. Despite its importance, we still have little predictive theory for language dynamics and richness. Critical to the language extinction problem, however, is to understand the dynamics of the number of speakers of languages, the dynamics of language abundance distributions (LADs). Many regional LADs are very similar to the bell-shaped distributions of relative species abundance predicted by neutral theory in ecology. Using the tenets of neutral theory, here we show that LADs can be understood as an equilibrium or disequilibrium between stochastic rates of origination and extinction of languages. However, neutral theory does not fit some regional LADs, which can be explained if the number of speakers has grown systematically faster in some languages than others, due to cultural factors and other non-neutral processes. Only the LADs of Australia and the United States, deviate from a bell-shaped pattern. These deviations are due to the documented higher, non-equilibrium extinction rates of low-abundance languages in these countries.
... Although evolutionary changes have resulted in a vast array of over 7000 languages spoken in the world today [4], the questions of "why so many languages" and "why so unevenly distributed" are far from being answered. Nonetheless, a vast corpus of research has emerged on the evolutionary, ecological and social correlates of the global distribution of linguistic diversity [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. ...
... Some analyses suggest that larger populations promote innovation, are less prone to cultural drift and random loss of linguistic elements, and may exhibit less stringent enforcement of norms, thus allowing languages to change faster [1,16,17,19,[23][24][25]. In contrast, other studies have argued that linguistic differentiation should be fastest in small populations due more rapid diffusion of new features [10], greater tolerance of diversity [26], and stronger response to contact resulting from trade and marriage across groups [24]. Recent models have added population structure as an essential demographic factor underlying cultural and linguistic evolution. ...
The origins of linguistic diversity remain controversial. Studies disagree on whether group features such as population size or social structure accelerate or decelerate linguistic differentiation. While some analyses of between-group factors highlight the role of geographical isolation and reduced linguistic exchange in differentiation, others suggest that linguistic divergence is driven primarily by warfare among neighbouring groups and the use of language as marker of group identity. Here we provide the first integrated test of the effects of five historical sociodemographic and geographic variables on three measures of linguistic diversification among 50 Austronesian languages: rates of word gain, loss and overall lexical turnover. We control for their shared evolutionary histories through a time-calibrated phylogenetic sister-pairs approach. Results show that languages spoken in larger communities create new words at a faster pace. Within-group conflict promotes linguistic differentiation by increasing word loss, while warfare hinders linguistic differentiation by decreasing both rates of word gain and loss. Finally, we show that geographical isolation is a strong driver of lexical evolution mainly due to a considerable drift-driven acceleration in rates of word loss. We conclude that the motor of extreme linguistic diversity in Austronesia may have been the dispersal of populations across relatively isolated islands, favouring strong cultural ties amongst societies instead of warfare and cultural group marking.
... In contrast with the species-area relation of Biology for which there are plenty of field data to check the theoretical proposals [24], in the culture-area relation there are practically no empirical evidences to back any quantitative theoretical prediction. However, there are some empirical results regarding the language-area relation [20,21], which are appropriate to mention here since the mechanisms of development, dissemination and acquisition of language are similar, if not identical, to those of culture. An extensive analysis of the language diversity that considers ecological and linguistic variables for about 74 countries yields C ∝ A x with x = 0.5 ± 0.1 [20]. ...
Axelrod's model for culture dissemination offers a nontrivial answer to the question of why there is cultural diversity given that people's beliefs have a tendency to become more similar to each other's as people interact repeatedly. The answer depends on the two control parameters of the model, namely, the number F of cultural features that characterize each agent, and the number q of traits that each feature can take on, as well as on the size A of the territory or, equivalently, on the number of interacting agents. Here we investigate the dependence of the number C of distinct coexisting cultures on the area A in Axelrod's model -- the culture-area relationship -- through extensive Monte Carlo simulations. We find a non-monotonous culture-area relation, for which the number of cultures decreases when the area grows beyond a certain size, provided that q is smaller than a threshold value and . In the limit of infinite area, this threshold value signals the onset of a discontinuous transition between a globalized regime marked by a uniform culture (C=1), and a completely polarized regime where all possible cultures coexist. Otherwise the culture-area relation exhibits the typical behavior of the species-area relation, i.e., a monotonically increasing curve the slope of which is steep at first and steadily levels off at some maximum diversity value.
... Sociocultural events, such as between-group competition, may cause cultural selection processes to speed up (Henrich & Muthukrishna, 2021), forcing a greater focus on detecting out-group members . Even if functional selection and stochastic drift (Nettle, 1999) lead to greater differences between groups in linguistic traits, increasing animosity and social boundaries may not only speed up such change through social selection, but also place greater emphasis on both manifesting and detecting culturally relevant norms at the individual level (see Labov, 1963;Giles, 1977;and Chambers, 1995 for examples of changes in accent-manifestation because of between-group animosity). Implicit to Kuran's model is recognition by individuals of Gandhi caps as ethnoreligious signals informing as to personal bias; accents, similarly, may become of increasing social importance insofar as the identities they signal have consequences for speaker and listener. ...
Previous research in the evolutionary and psychological sciences has suggested that markers or tags of ethnic or group membership may help to solve cooperation and coordination problems. Cheating remains, however, a problem for these views, insofar as it is possible to fake the tag. While evolutionary psychologists have suggested that humans evolved the propensity to overcome this free rider problem, it is unclear how this module might manifest at the group level. In this study, we investigate the degree to which native and non-native speakers of accents – which are candidates for tags of group membership – spoken in the UK and Ireland can detect mimicry. We find that people are, overall, better than chance at detecting mimicry, and secondly we find substantial inter-group heterogeneity, suggesting that cultural evolutionary processes drive the manifestations of cheater detection. We discuss alternative explanations and suggest avenues of further inquiry.
... As 3sg is also the most frequent subject marker in spoken corpora, this points to an important role of the conserving effect of frequency of use in the change of subject markers (Bybee & Thompson, 1997). However, there may be other factors involved in the conservative nature of 3sg, such as the effects of zero marking in certain languages (Launey, 2004), the possibility that there are cross-linguistic attractor lengths that subject markers converge to (Seržant & Moroz, 2022) and the role of social factors like community size on rate of change (Nettle, 1999b). ...
In this thesis, I study how languages change in situations where languages or groups of speakers are in contact with each other. As language change is inherently caused by interaction between individuals, I use a technique from multi-agent Artificial Intelligence (AI) that puts the interaction of individuals central: agent-based computer simulations. I apply these agent-based models to specific case studies of language change in the real world. The goal of the thesis is two-fold: getting a better view of the mechanisms behind language change and studying how computational methods work on real-world problems with small amounts of data. I present three different computer models, which each answer a particular linguistic question given a specific case study or dataset.
In my first model, I study how language contact can make languages simplify, using a case study of Alorese, a language in Eastern Indonesia. By integrating data from the language into an agent-based model, I study if the phonotactics of the language -- the allowed structure of sounds following each other -- could play a role in simplification. In my second model, I investigate if mechanisms in conversations could be a factor in language change. Using an agent-based model, I show how speakers influencing each other's linguistic choices in conversations can under certain circumstances, lead to spread of an innovative form In my third model, I investigate what could be a cognitively realistic computer model for the `brain' of the speakers, that could be used in an agent-based simulation. I develop a neural network model, based on a technique called Adaptive Resonance Theory, which has as its task to cluster verbs that conjugate in the same way into groups. The model is able to learn the systems of verbs of languages from different families while being interpretable: it is possible to visualise to which parts of the words the network attends.
Together, the three models show how different mechanisms that interact with each other can lead to language change when languages are in contact. The models show how mechanisms working on short timescales, such as on the scale of a conversation, can cause effects in the longer term, leading to language change. At the same time, this thesis gives insights for the development of communication in multi-agent AI systems, especially when there are multiple types of agents, as is the case in language contact situations.
... Biological ecology and cultural ecology are interconnected. 1 Indeed, two decades ago, Nettle (1999) Illustration 1. A sample of the fifty-nine wordlists that Wallace collected during his zoological fieldwork in the archipelago (Wallace 1869:468). ...
... Like other notions built on the pool metaphor-e.g., the linguistic pool (Nettle 1999) or the meme pool (Dawkins 1976)-Mufwene's feature pool is conceptualized as an undifferentiated pool of linguistic features, a term encompassing any kind of linguistic element including lexical items, phones and phonemes, morphological and syntactic constructions, formulaic expressions, etc. The pool metaphor has the advantage of detaching individual features from languages, thus allowing more fine-grained and nuanced analyses of change processes, but it specifies nothing regarding which features may be more likely to be selected as norms in a newly emerging variety (though see Matras 2009: 310-312 for relevant considerations). ...
Forthc. in a monographic issue of the journal Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads.
With more than seventy named languages, and many more locally distinctive varieties, the Cameroonian Grassfields are known for their impressive linguistic diversity. At the same time, the languages of the Grassfields also show a considerable degree of structural homogeneity and lexical similarity which is suggestive of both genealogical relatedness and prolonged processes of contact-induced convergence. However, fine-grained comparative analyses reveal puzzling situations of similarities and differences among neighboring languages and varieties. Often left unaddressed or viewed as "irregularities", these cases might in fact provide insights into low-level language dynamics that have contributed significantly to the development of the regional linguistic configuration. In this paper, we focus on two such cases involving noun classes and tense-aspect marking and propose a model of language change based on a notion that we term the social semiosis layer, which is viewed as a specific part of a linguistic feature pool. When paired with the existing notion of neighbor opposition, it can account for situations where there is evidence that specific forms have been deliberately manipulated to create salient distinctions among varieties in a given local sociolinguistic context.
... En la bibliografía especializada existe una extensa producción sobre la diversidad lingüística y sobre el significado de este concepto, aunque ésta todavía no es suficiente (Junghere 2013;Nettle 1999). En cambio, no sucede lo mismo con el concepto de diversidad sociolingüística; podríamos decir que este nuevo campo se está conformando con otro tipo de problemáticas y temas de investigación. ...
This article aims to analyze Otopame sociolinguistic diversity in Veracruz, mainly the use of Otomi in the municipality of Ixhuatlan de Madero, Veracruz. This presents interesting sociolinguistic phenomena such as multilingualism, in which minority languages such as Otomi, Nahuatl, Tepehua, and Totonac coexist with each other and with the majority language of Spanish. For the analysis of sociolinguistic diversity, it is important to consider the vital state in which these languages are found or their disappearance. The economic power, social status, population density of speakers, and symbolic value assigned to the languages is therefore of vital importance in diagnosing the sociolinguistic situation of the Otomi in Veracruz, through detailed and complete information. This article is part of the research project “Linguistic ideologies: national languages and Spanish and their relationship with politics and identity,” by the Faculty of Anthropology at the Universidad Veracruzana.
... Data on contemporary growing season length as a function of latitude are from Håkonson & Boulion (2001) and those for contemporary disease prevalence as a function of latitude are from Bonds et al. (2012). Data on the number of religions and disease load by country are from and , and on the geographic 12 distribution of languages from Nettle (1999). For simplicity, a country's latitude is taken to be that of its capital city. ...
Doctrinal religions that involve recognised gods, more formal theologies, moral codes, dedicated religious spaces and professional priesthoods emerged in two phases during the Neolithic. Almost all of these appeared in a narrow latitudinal band (the northern Subtropical Zone). I suggest that these developments were the result of a need to facilitate community bonding in response to scalar stresses that developed as community sizes increased dramatically beyond those typical of hunter-gatherer societies. Conditions for population growth (as indexed by rainfall patterns and the difference between pathogen load and the length of the growing season) were uniquely optimised in this zone, creating an environment of ecological release in which populations could grow unusually rapidly. The relationship between latitude, religion and language in contemporary societies suggests that the peculiar characteristics of the northern (but not the southern) Subtropical Zone were especially favourable for the evolution of large scale religions as a way of enforcing community cohesion.
... However, research suggests that teaching and learning in linguistically diverse classrooms is a significant challenge for both students and teachers (Dotzel et al. 2021, Phalet et al. 2004). The concept of linguistic diversity was approached in three ways by theoretical linguistics, namely language diversity, genealogical diversity, and structural variety (Hammarstrom 2016, Nettle, 1999. Among the three approaches, language diversity seems to be the most relevant to educational research (Busse et al. 2019). ...
Research suggests that students from linguistically diverse settings may show better learning outcomes, especially at languages. However, existing studies on the topic are predominantly theoretical ones and focus on developed countries. This study empirically examines linguistic diversity and learning outcomes with respect to developing countries. Specially, it investigates the association between linguistic diversity and students’ reading achievements and explores how consistent findings are across countries. It draws from PISA for Development 2018 data to compute two measures of linguistic diversity and uses hierarchical linear modeling for a quantitative empirical analysis. Results suggest that linguistic diversity as measured by the two approaches used in this study is not associated with students’ reading achievements, and the lack of statistical association is consistent across countries. These findings seem to provide evidence showing that linguistic diversity does not influence learning outcomes. / Keywords: linguistic diversity, Blau index, Herfindahl–Hirschman index (HHI), HLM, PISA for development
... Therefore, it should come as no surprise that many climatic and ecological factors that also exhibit clear latitudinal patterns correlate with language richness. These factors include net primary productivity, rainfall, temperature, mean growing season, and biodiversity 4,6,10,[13][14][15][16] . Geographically, mountains-and topographic complexity more generally, rivers, habitat heterogeneity, and the size and distance to nearest landmasses of islands have all been shown to have some association with richness 9,12,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23] . ...
Humans currently collectively use thousands of languages1,2. The number of languages in a given region (i.e. language “richness”) varies widely3–7. Understanding the processes of diversification and homogenization that produce these patterns has been a fundamental aim of linguistics and anthropology. Empirical research to date has identified various social, environmental, geographic, and demographic factors associated with language richness3. However, our understanding of causal mechanisms and variation in their effects over space has been limited by prior analyses focusing on correlation and assuming stationarity3,8. Here we use process-based, spatially-explicit stochastic models to simulate the emergence, expansion, contraction, fragmentation, and extinction of language ranges. We varied combinations of parameter settings in these computer-simulated experiments to evaluate the extent to which different processes reproduce observed patterns of pre-colonial language richness in North America. We find that the majority of spatial variation in language richness can be explained by models in which environmental and social constraints determine population density, random shocks alter population sizes more frequently at higher population densities, and population shocks are more frequently negative than positive. Language diversification occurs when populations split after reaching size limits, and when ranges fragment due to population contractions following negative shocks or due to contact with other groups that are expanding following positive shocks. These findings support diverse theoretical perspectives arguing that language richness is shaped by environmental and social conditions, constraints on group sizes, outcomes of contact among groups, and shifting demographics driven by positive innovations, such as new subsistence strategies, or negative events, such as war or disease.
... The term dialect is used to define vocal variations among populations, at different geographical scales . Vocal dialects (also referred to as "vocal cultures") have been demonstrated in a wide range of vocal learning taxa (Catchpole & Slater, 2008;Janik & Slater, 1997 including humans (Trudgill, 1983;Nettle, 1999), and constitute the largest body of evidence for cultures in the animal kingdom. Vocal dialects of nonhuman animals have been widely described in birds. ...
For a long time, culture has been considered as a human specificity but there is extensive evidence in the animal kingdom that several species exhibit behavioural patterns considered as cultures. Birdsong is a learned behaviour and has been demonstrated as a valid model to study the evolution of vocal culture. The aim of this study is to track the cultural evolution of song in colonies of zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata), starting with an extreme initial condition under which all male founders produce a very similar song after being trained with the same song model. Two colonies were founded by males singing a same song model and one colony was founded by males singing another song model. Overall, the results show that, in such artificial conditions, the song evolved in a way that the similarity to the initial model was maintained over time and each song model led to different acoustic specificities. This demonstration constitutes the first experimental evidence that song dialects can emerge in the zebra finch, forming distinct vocal cultures. Because such song variations could have biological significance in this social species, we investigated their implications for female preference and social learning. Female zebra finches preferred their native song dialect over a stranger one. Yet, birds of both sexes were not more likely to copy the food choice of a bird singing the dialect of their own colony than the choice of a bird singing a different dialect. This thesis work constitutes one step in understanding the cultural evolution of the zebra finch song in the laboratory and more generally, provides a better understanding of the dynamics of cultural evolution of communication signals, which represent an important topic in language research.
... That is of course an important question, but there are other aspects of the history of the Indo-European languages that should also be pursued. For example, we know little about how the rates of change among different components of language (phonology, morphology, syntax, and the lexicon) vary over time (see Nettle 1999a, Nettle 1999b, Clackson 2000 Computational methods also enable researchers to assess the extent to which the data provide evidence for a particular clade. This is absolutely crucial to any phylogenetic analysis. ...
The last twenty or so years have witnessed a dramatic increase in the use of computational methods for inferring linguistic phylogenies. Although the results of this research have been controversial, the methods themselves are an undeniable boon for historical and Indo-European linguistics, if for no other reason than that they allow the field to pursue questions that were previously intractable. After a review of the advantages and disadvantages of computational phylogenetic methods, I introduce the following methods of phylogenetic inference in R: maximum parsimony; distance-based methods ( UPGMA and neighbor joining); and maximum likelihood estimation. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each of these methods and in addition explicate various measures associated with phylogenetic estimation, including homoplasy indices and bootstrapping. Phylogenetic inference is carried out on the Indo-European dataset compiled by Don Ringe and Ann Taylor, which includes phonological, morphological, and lexical characters.
... The issue of the relation between linguistic areas and geographical space is equally controversial. On the one hand, there is no doubt that at least some large-scale linguistic distributions are partly determined by geographical factors, e.g., the significantly higher linguistic diversity in the tropics (see Nettle 1999;Collard and Foley 2002). Moreover, it is intuitively clear that geographical patterns and events are among the factors which determine linguistic history in space and time, including the presence, trajectory, and speed of contact-induced diffusion, and thus steer the distributional dynamics of features more generally. ...
Taking up Diamond’s (1999) geographical axis hypothesis regarding the different population histories of continental areas, Güldemann (2008, 2010) proposed that macro-areal aggregations of linguistic features are influenced by geographical factors. This chapter explores this idea by extending it to the whole world in testing whether the way linguistic features assemble over long time spans and large space is influenced by what we call “latitude spread potential” and “longitude spread constraint.” Regarding the former, the authors argue in particular that contact-induced feature distributions as well as genealogically defined language groups with a sufficient geographical extension tend to have a latitudinal orientation. Regarding the latter, the authors provide first results suggesting that linguistic diversity within language families tends to be higher along longitude axes. If replicated by more extensive and diverse testing, the authors’ findings promise to become important ingredients for a comprehensive theory of human history across space and time within linguistics and beyond.
... 25 Colonial language varieties for metropolitan France, just like varieties of Latin spoken in the provinces during the Roman Empire, were, to use Nettle's metaphor, "amplifiers of variation". 26 ...
This paper compares the romanization of Gaul in the 1st century BC and the gallicization of the island of Martinique during 17th-century French colonial expansion, using criteria set out by Muf- wene's Founder Principle. The Founder Principle determines key ecological factors in the formation of creole vernaculars, such as the founding populations and their proportion to the whole, language varieties spoken, and the nature and evolution of the interactions of the founding populations (also referred to as “colonization styles”). Based on the comparison, it will be claimed that new languages arise when a language undergoes vehicularization and subsequently shifts from one speech community to another. In other words, linguistic genesis would be a complicated case of language contact, where not only one, but sev- eral dialects of both superstrate and substrate varieties are involved, in a historical context where the identity function of language, or the norm, is overriden by the need to communicate. Research also indicates that language varieties spoken at the time of the shift did not pertain to normative usage, but to popular varieties, dialects, or both, since the emerging vernaculars - in Gaul, as well as in Martinique - preserved some of their phonological and lexical particularities.
... Biological metaphor has frequently been applied to explain or demonstrate language phenomena (see, e.g., Nettle, 1999). However, the CARS model reads equally well if one applies business metaphor: it is necessary to find a niche for a product or service by introducing the product, demonstrating that there is a need for it, and convincing the potential client that the product offered satisfies the need in a better way than any other product currently available. ...
At first glance, the world of business and the world of academia could not be wider apart. The former is typically associated with money and profit, the power of persuasion, and various mechanisms of self-promotion; the latter, if somewhat illusively, with a selfless pursuit of truth, data which speak for themselves, and the priority of disciplinary development over personal achievement. Still, a closer look at some discourse patterns shows that, at least in terms of communication practices, business and academia do have strong points of contact. The aim of this chapter is to draw attention to some of those shared discourse mechanisms, referring primarily to the research article. It refers to the Create-a-Research-Space model of rhetorical moves in research article introductions proposed by Swales (1981, 1990) to show that this traditional, canonical academic genre is not incompatible with rhetorical tools which are more readily associated with business discourse, and that its structure and function of some of its segments may actually invite their use.
Linguistic typology identifies both how languages vary and what they all have in common. This Handbook provides a state-of-the art survey of the aims and methods of linguistic typology, and the conclusions we can draw from them. Part I covers phonological typology, morphological typology, sociolinguistic typology and the relationships between typology, historical linguistics and grammaticalization. It also addresses typological features of mixed languages, creole languages, sign languages and secret languages. Part II features contributions on the typology of morphological processes, noun categorization devices, negation, frustrative modality, logophoricity, switch reference and motion events. Finally, Part III focuses on typological profiles of the mainland South Asia area, Australia, Quechuan and Aymaran, Eskimo-Aleut, Iroquoian, the Kampa subgroup of Arawak, Omotic, Semitic, Dravidian, the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian and the Awuyu-Ndumut family (in West Papua). Uniting the expertise of a stellar selection of scholars, this Handbook highlights linguistic typology as a major discipline within the field of linguistics.
Linguistic typology identifies both how languages vary and what they all have in common. This Handbook provides a state-of-the art survey of the aims and methods of linguistic typology, and the conclusions we can draw from them. Part I covers phonological typology, morphological typology, sociolinguistic typology and the relationships between typology, historical linguistics and grammaticalization. It also addresses typological features of mixed languages, creole languages, sign languages and secret languages. Part II features contributions on the typology of morphological processes, noun categorization devices, negation, frustrative modality, logophoricity, switch reference and motion events. Finally, Part III focuses on typological profiles of the mainland South Asia area, Australia, Quechuan and Aymaran, Eskimo-Aleut, Iroquoian, the Kampa subgroup of Arawak, Omotic, Semitic, Dravidian, the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian and the Awuyu-Ndumut family (in West Papua). Uniting the expertise of a stellar selection of scholars, this Handbook highlights linguistic typology as a major discipline within the field of linguistics.
The field of linguistic anthropology looks at human uniqueness and diversity through the lens of language, our species' special combination of art and instinct. Human language both shapes, and is shaped by, our minds, societies, and cultural worlds. This state-of-the-field survey covers a wide range of topics, approaches and theories, such as the nature and function of language systems, the relationship between language and social interaction, and the place of language in the social life of communities. Promoting a broad vision of the subject, spanning a range of disciplines from linguistics to biology, from psychology to sociology and philosophy, this authoritative handbook is an essential reference guide for students and researchers working on language and culture across the social sciences.
A central concern of the cognitive science of language since its origins has been the concept of the linguistic system. Recent approaches to the system concept in language point to the exceedingly complex relations that hold between many kinds of interdependent systems, but it can be difficult to know how to proceed when “everything is connected.” This paper offers a framework for tackling that challenge by identifying *scale* as a conceptual mooring for the interdisciplinary study of language systems. The paper begins by defining the scale concept—simply, the possibility for a measure to be larger or smaller in different instances of a system, such as a phonemic inventory, a word's frequency value in a corpus, or a speaker population. We review sites of scale difference in and across linguistic subsystems, drawing on findings from linguistic typology, grammatical description, morphosyntactic theory, psycholinguistics, computational corpus work, and social network demography. We consider possible explanations for scaling differences and constraints in language. We then turn to the question of *dependencies between* sites of scale difference in language, reviewing four sample domains of scale dependency: in phonological systems, across levels of grammatical structure (Menzerath's Law), in corpora (Zipf's Law and related issues), and in speaker population size. Finally, we consider the implications of the review, including the utility of a scale framework for generating new questions and inspiring methodological innovations and interdisciplinary collaborations in cognitive‐scientific research on language.
Have you ever wondered whether we are alone in the universe, or if life forms on other planets might exist? If they do exist, how might their languages have evolved? Could we ever understand them, and indeed learn to communicate with them? This highly original, thought-provoking book takes us on a fascinating journey over billions of years, from the formation of galaxies and solar systems, to the appearance of planets in the habitable zones of their parent stars, and then to how biology and, ultimately, human life arose on our own planet. It delves into how our brains and our language developed, in order to explore the likelihood of communication beyond Earth and whether it would evolve along similar lines. In the process, fascinating insights from the fields of astronomy, evolutionary biology, palaeoanthropology, neuroscience and linguistics are uncovered, shedding new light on life as we know it on Earth, and beyond.
In this chapter, I critically examine the foundations of two major research programs aimed at filling the gap between the completion of glottogenesis and the known ancient languages: macro-comparativists in historical linguistics and the unification of genetic approaches with linguistic approaches (again of macro-comparativist tendency) in the series of studies led by Luca Cavalli-Sforza. The super-objective “to reconstruct a single proto-European language” (whether “proto-Indo-European” or “Nostratic”) seems to be dubious. In my alternative approach, I suggest a series of macrosocial laws of linguistic evolution based mainly on common sense and historical intuition. The Toba volcano eruption circa 74 thousand years ago (hereafter—kya) led to the “volcanic winter” catastrophe and significant depopulation. The macroprocesses of language evolution accompanied the settlement of sapienses on continents and islands, ethnogenesis, and the stages of political evolution according to R. Carneiro, and world-system evolution according to I. Wallerstein. The number of primary language families (with the apparent close kinship of languages) seems constant, but the number of languages has changed dramatically.KeywordsToba volcanoDemographical bottleneckDepopulationMacro-comparativistsNumber of languagesNostratic languagePolitical evolutionEvolution of the world system
Linguistic diversity has seen two large waves of the loss of linguistic diversity across history. The first wave occurred with the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies, a process that started 11,000 years ago with the Neolithic revolution when agrarian societies colonized territories of hunter-gatherer communities. The second wave started with the establishment of modern nation states and the creation and diffusion of national languages. It is in the latter setting that the vast majority of language endangerment cases are set today. Endangered languages are predominantly replaced by national languages (and not by global English). The institutions of the ‘nation state’ and of ‘national language’ constitute fundamental problems for ethnolinguistic minorities, because their establishment entail the threat of either exclusion or assimilation of these minorities from the nation. In such a situation, minority language and their speakers do usually not fare well. Without altering the modernist language ecologies that exist in modern nation states, language maintenance and revitalization activities are bound to fail in their principal objectives. In this paper, I examine the rise of language nationalism in Japan in the Meiji period (1868-1912), depict how it led to language endangerment, and show how it continues to shape believes about language in contemporary Japan, also within endangered language revitalization activities and policies themselves. Language revitalization requires language ideological clarification, a recalibration of the relations between majority and minorities, and fundamentally new language policies. In the final part, I report on partial changes that can be seen in this direction for the case of the endangered Ainu and Ryukyuan languages in Japan, and analyze to what extent the local language revitalization movements and efforts have so far succeeded in “remaking social reality” (Fishman 1991: 411) together with the majority population of Japan.
Questo articolo si propone di analizzare l'uso dei pronomi allocutivi, nella loro veste di riferimenti deittici, da parte di parlanti di lingue minoritarie. Attingendo agli approcci teorici e metodologici della pragmatica e della sociolinguistica, questo studio mostra come la dimensione demografica di una comunità linguistica possa influenzare la codifica del contesto sociale e interazionale e come questo sia in grado di agire sulle scelte linguistiche dei parlanti.The aim of this paper is to explore the use of address pronouns, as deictic references, by speakers of minority languages. Drawing on pragmatics and sociolinguistics theoretical and methodological approaches, this study shows how the size of a linguistic community can affect the encoding of social and interactional context and how this is able to act on speakers’ language choices.
Industrialization and Assimilation examines the process of ethnic identity change in a broad historical context. Green explains how and why ethnicity changes across time, showing that, by altering the basis of economic production from land to labour and removing people from the 'idiocy of rural life', industrialization makes societies more ethnically homogenous. More specifically, the author argues that industrialization lowers the relative value of rural land, leading people to identify less with narrow rural identities in favour of broader identities that can aid them in navigating the formal urban economy. Using large-scale datasets that span the globe as well as detailed case studies ranging from mid-twentieth-century Turkey to contemporary Botswana, Somalia and Uganda, as well as evidence from Native Americans in the United States and the Māori in New Zealand, Industrialization and Assimilation provides a new framework to understand the origins of modern ethnic identities.
Language contact - the linguistic and social outcomes of two or more languages coming into contact with each other - starts with the emergence of multilingual populations. Multilingualism involving plurilingualism can have various consequences beyond borrowing, interference, and code-mixing and -switching, including the emergence of lingua francas and new language varieties, as well as language endangerment and loss. Bringing together contributions from an international team of scholars, this Handbook - the second in a two-volume set - engages the reader with the manifold aspects of multilingualism and provides state-of-the-art research on the impact of population structure on language contact. It begins with an introduction that presents the history of the scholarship on the subject matter. The chapters then cover various processes and theoretical issues associated with multilingualism embedded in specific population structures worldwide as well as their outcomes. It is essential reading for anybody interested in how people behave linguistically in multilingual or multilectal settings.
Language endangerment and loss is a longstanding phenomenon affecting both non-contact languages and contact languages, but contact languages are particularly susceptible. This endangerment has greatly increased and sped up in the last century. Case studies of several languages in China and Thailand show that structural change is often more rapid during language shift. Tujia has been receding for millennia in central China; Gong may have originated during contact between speakers of a variety of Burmese and several local languages in western Thailand several hundred years ago. Several small groups in western China speak languages developed in contact between speakers of Mongolic languages, Tibetan, and Chinese in western China in garrisons set up from about 700 years ago on. The final part of this chapter discusses how communities may be assisted to react to the endangerment of their language. While linguists can document a language, it is only the speakers and the community who can decide and act to maintain it. Some of the problems leading to endangerment and the strategies to overcome them are briefly discussed.
When do the mechanisms of regular sound change fail to apply? What types of languages and situations exhibit and promote phonological stability? I consider these questions using data from the languages of Aboriginal Australia, where there has been debate on this question. I show that the standard explanations are inadequate, and possible solutions have not yet been empirically investigated. Given how many of these languages are already either no longer spoken or severely under threat, it is important to investigate these questions urgently.
Language contact phenomena of English use in advertising in East Asia, especially China, Japan, and South Korea have long before received ample attention of (socio)linguists as early as in the 1980s. This chapter reviews work on the use of English in advertising discourse of the East Asian region. It starts by outlining the status of English in East Asia; then sketches studies of English use in East Asian advertising centering primarily around four themes---functions, creative and innovative uses, identity and community, and attitudes and responses of readers/viewers; and finally lays out the direction for future research by accentuating the desire for a critical perspective on this language contact phenomenon in global advertising.
Previous studies have demonstrated that countries, biodiversity hotspots, wildness areas, and islands with high biodiversity also have high linguistic diversity, while the regional correlation between phonetic, lexical, and grammatical diversity within a particular kind of language and biodiversity has not been verified. Based on the methods of GIS visualization and Spearman correlation coefficient, the regional differences and correlations between linguistic diversity and biodiversity in China are investigated in this paper using the numbers of plant species, animal species, Chinese dialects, and the data of phonetic, lexical, and grammatical diversity of Chinese dialects. The results reveal the positive regional correlations between the diversity of Chinese dialects, as well as the phonetic, lexical, and grammatical diversity of Chinese dialects and biodiversity. In addition, the regional correlation between linguistic diversity and plant diversity is stronger than that between linguistic diversity and animal diversity. The diversity of Chinese dialects is being weakened by the industrialization and urbanization. Furthermore, some countermeasures to protect linguistic diversity are proposed, such as protecting biodiversity and small communities, as well as promoting national language resource protection projects.
This study investigates the relatedness and history of the Austronesian languages of Borneo, which is the third largest island in the world and home to significant linguistic diversity. We apply Bayesian phylogenetic dating methods to lexical cognate data based on four historical calibration points to infer a dated phylogeny of 87 languages. The inferred tree topology agrees with the mid and lower-level subgrouping proposals based on the classical comparative method, but suggests a different higher-level organization. The root age of the dated tree is shallower than the archaeological estimates but agrees with a hypothesis of a past linguistic leveling event. The inferred homelands of the major linguistic subgroups from a Bayesian phylogeographic analysis agree with the homeland proposals from archaeology and linguistics. The inferred homelands for four of the eight subgroups support the riverine homeland hypothesis whereby the major linguistic subgroups developed initially in communities situated along Borneo’s major rivers.
A macroecological view suggests some global drivers of language endangerment and continuity, but a focus on individual languages will be important to stem the tide of language loss.
Language is the human universal mode of communication, and is dynamic and constantly in flux accommodating user needs as individuals interface with a changing world. However, we know surprisingly little about how language responds to market integration, a pressing force affecting indigenous communities worldwide today. While models of culture change often emphasize the replacement of one language, trait, or phenomenon with another following socioeconomic transitions, we present a more nuanced framework. We use demographic, economic, linguistic, and social network data from a rural Maya community that spans a 27-year period and the transition to market integration. By adopting this multivariate approach for the acquisition and use of languages, we find that while the number of bilingual speakers has significantly increased over time, bilingualism appears stable rather than transitionary. We provide evidence that when indigenous and majority languages provide complementary social and economic payoffs, both can be maintained. Our results predict the circumstances under which indigenous language use may be sustained or at risk. More broadly, the results point to the evolutionary dynamics that shaped the current distribution of the world’s linguistic diversity.
The study explores the Impact of Linguistic Diversity on the Curricula of Humanity Sciences studies regarding equality, linguistic rights, power and solidarity and identity. This is by means of teaching and learning additional academic languages towards the educational objectives, knowledge re/construction and developments in the local, national and international contexts. In this study, Linguistic Diversity refers to sociolinguistic or functional Linguistic Diversity of the students, in which they are the three university academic languages (Kurdish, Arabic, and English) in the curricula of Humanity Science studies. While, the curricula refer to the whole processes including syllabi, and courses implementation and pedagogy i.e. teaching and learning, evaluation, administration and social factors.
The problem is that the used additional languages are not achieved proficiently so that it affects low achievements at higher education academic Humanity Sciences studies at Salahaddin University-Erbil as a public university. One reason is that many languages in Kurdistan Region including Kurdish, Turkumani, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, and English are incomprehensibly learned and performed; another reason is social inequalities in pedagogy and curricula implementation.
The main questions are:
1-How is the ecology of the Linguistic Diversity in Kurdistan Region-Iraqi Federal?
2-Does Linguistic Diversity affect the curricula of Humanity Sciences studies with the influences of social justice, equity pedagogy towards development according to the national and international professional proficiencies?
The study hypothesizes that there are Linguistic Diversity problems that affect the achievements of the curricula linguistic and content objectives. There are inequalities and prejudices in the linguistic rights, curriculum pedagogy and design and the balance between theoretical and practical knowledge comprehension and adaptation.
The study explores and investigates the weaknesses and problems arise in the impact of the Linguistic Diversity and effects of inequality pedagogy on the curricula and content integration of the Humanity Science studies at Salahaddin University-Erbil, that affect graduates’ outcomes, productions and academic theoretical and practical knowledge construction in the local, national and international contexts, it tries to confirm or approve the reasons and causes of those problems. So, the study is regarded as exploratory to confirmatory of philology in curriculum implementation.
The methodology of the study is both qualitative and quantitative. In which, the methods are compatible and parallel questionnaires for students, teachers and an interview checklist for decision makers. The participants are senior students 336/1600 = 21%, teachers 58/490 =14.87%, and decision makers 13 people. Regarding the results, 74.576 of the overall items was positively acknowledged, and %25.423 of the overall items was negatively acknowledged.
It has been found that the majority of the participants’ quantitative and qualitative attitudes were positive regarding the linguistic rights, respect of identities, proper interactions, and theoretical knowledge construction. Also, the negative points are that Linguistic Diversity is not properly implemented in the curricula of Humanity Science studies; it causes problems of learning, knowledge re/construction and sustainable development. Some urgent problems are in pedagogy concerning balancing between theoretical and practical knowledge, evaluation approach concerning balancing between assessment and measurement, language and translation skills, linguistic and content objectives. In which, they affect the lack of students’ knowledge achievements; they will not be able and capable of being active academicians, leaders and entrepreneurs. It causes weaknesses in academic linguistic professional proficiencies, techniques of teaching and strategies of learning, translation skills, student as researcher, practical knowledge construction, and assessments.
The study can be beneficial for making better developments in the pedagogical implementations, content-based curriculum development and regular evaluation approach.
Motivated by collaboration in human and human-robot groups, we consider designing lossy source codes for agents in networks that are in different statistical environments but also must communicate with one another along network connections. This yields a strategic network quantizer design problem where agents must balance fidelity in representing their local source distributions against their ability to successfully communicate with other connected agents. Using network game theory, we show existence of Bayes Nash equilibrium quantizers. For any agent, under Bayes Nash equilibrium, we prove that the word representing a given partition region is the conditional expectation of the mixture of local and social source probability distributions within the region. Since having knowledge of the original source of information in the network may not be realistic, we further prove that under certain conditions, the agents need not know the source origin and yet still settle on a Bayes Nash equilibrium using only the observed sources. Further, we prove the network may converge to equilibrium through a distributed version of the Lloyd-Max algorithm, rather than centralized design. In contrast to traditional results in language evolution, we demonstrate several vocabularies may coexist in Bayes Nash equilibrium, with each individual having exactly one of these vocabularies. The overlap between vocabularies is high for individuals that communicate frequently and have similar local sources. Finally, we prove that error in translation along a chain of communication does not grow if and only if the chain consists of agents with shared vocabulary. Numerical examples demonstrate our findings.
The ability to differentiate old (definite) and new (indefinite) information is necessary for successful human communication (Evans and Levinson, 2009:437). Definite articles are one method of indicating that information is old, but these are present in fewer than half of the world’s languages (Dryer, 2013a). If indicating definiteness in discourse is essential for communicative success, it stands to reason that languages without definite articles communicate this information through alternate means. This dissertation investigates why definite articles might fail to emerge in a language and asks whether or not the use of specific morphosyntactic properties can be used to predict the absence of a definite article. It also asks whether or not alternate cues can be used to predict
that a referent will be definite in languages that lack a definite article.
To determine whether or not a relationship exists between the use of specific morphosyntactic properties and the emergence of definite articles, I conducted a grammar-mining study of 100 typologically diverse languages. These languages were coded for the presence or absence of ten morphosyntactic properties, including the use of definite articles. Random forest and conditional inference models were used to test whether or not the absence of a definite article could be predicted based on other elements in a language. To determine whether or not alternate cues can be
used to predict definiteness, I also conducted corpus studies of Colloquial Jakarta Indonesian and Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), two languages without articles. Logistic regression, random forest, and conditional inference models were used to determine if language-specific properties could be used to predict whether or not a discourse referent would be definite. The results of this research show that languages with case marking, OV word order, flexible subject order, and ergative or split ergative alignment are less likely than other languages to develop a definite article. They also show that in Colloquial Jakarta Indonesian and Kalaallisut, elements such as word order and case could be used to predict whether or not a referent will be definite, even without the added benefit of context. These results suggest that semantic definiteness can be cued by properties other than definite articles, and that cognitive pressures toward efficiency depress the
likelihood of a definite article emerging in the presence of such cues.
This paper discusses the role of English as the current lingua franca academica in contrast to a multilingual approach to scientific inquiry on the basis of four perspectives: a cognitive, a typological, a contrastive and a domain-specific one. It is argued that a distinction must be drawn between the natural sciences and the humanities in order to properly assess the potential of either linguistic solution to the problem of scientific communication. To the extent that the results of scientific research are expressed in formal languages and international standardised terminology, the exclusive use of one lingua franca is unproblematic, especially if phenomena of our external world are under consideration. In the humanities, by contrast, especially in the analysis of our non-visible, mental world, a single lingua franca cannot be regarded as a neutral instrument, but may more often than not become a conceptual prison. For the humanities the analysis of the conceptual system of a language provides the most reliable access to its culture. For international exchange of results, however, the humanities too have to rely on a suitable lingua franca as language of description as opposed to the language under description.
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This volume emerged from a collaborative Network of Excellence project funded by the European Commission. The Network, which comprises thirty-two institutes from Europe and beyond, integrates European research capabilities across disciplines and countries to provide the society and the state with tools for managing cultural diversity as a key element of sustainable development. The work presented here describes the emergence and increasing importance of diversity within academic research and practice and offers valuable insights on diversity management and policy implementation.
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Attempts to classify Tupí-Guaraní languages have so far been inconsistent with archaeological evidence and ignored information from historical sources. The case of Tupinambá is most illustrative in this regard. Using both Bayesian phylogenetic analysis and a stochastic algorithm that reconstructs phylogenetic trees by relying on maximum likelihood estimation, we suggest a new internal classification of the Tupí-Guaraní branch. The results of the analyses are in accordance with the most recent genetic research on Tupían populations and challenge previous classifications by suggesting, among others, that Tupinambá should not be considered a ‘Guaraní’ language.
Structurally, cognitive and biological evolution are highly similar. Random variation and constant but blind selection drive evolution within biology as well as within cognition. However, evolution of cognitive programs, and in particular of grammar systems, is not a subclass of biological evolution but a domain of its own. The abstract evolutionary principles, however, are akin in cognitive and biological evolution. In other words, insights gained in the biological domain can be cautiously applied to the cognitive domain. This paper claims that the cognitively encapsulated, i.e. consciously inaccessible, aspects of grammars as cognitively represented systems, that is, the procedural and structural parts of grammars, are subject to, and results of, Darwinian evolution, applying to a domain-specific cognitive program. Other, consciously accessible aspects of language do not fall under Darwinian evolutionary principles, but are mostly instances of social changes.
This entry starts out with a discussion, in very broad strokes, of the evolutionary basis of linguistic diversity. What follows is an overview of the many ways in which languages differ and a description of how diversity relates to space and time. The argument is made that even though diversity is not unrestricted, true universals are few and far between. Then the way in which linguists cope with diversity (with terms such as superdiversity or transience) is briefly discussed. The entry concludes with considerations of the political treatment of linguistic diversity and the role played by language ideologies.
Our species displays remarkable linguistic diversity. Although the uneven distribution of this diversity demands explanation, the drivers of these patterns have not been conclusively determined. We address this issue in two steps: First, we review previous empirical studies whose authors have suggested environmental, geographical, and sociocultural drivers of linguistic diversification. However, contradictory results and methodological variation make it difficult to draw general conclusions. Second, we outline a program for future research. We suggest that future analyses should account for interactions among causal factors, the lack of spatial and phylogenetic independence of the data, and transitory patterns. Recent analytical advances in biogeography and evolutionary biology, such as simulation modeling of diversity patterns, hold promise for testing four key mechanisms of language diversification proposed here: neutral change, population movement, contact, and selection. Future modeling approaches should also evaluate how the outcomes of these processes are influenced by demography, environmental heterogeneity, and time.
Abstract Across the planet the biogeographic distribution of human cultural diversity tends to correlate positively with biodiversity. In this paper we focus on the biogeographic distribution of mammal species and human cultural diversity. We show that not only are these forms of diversity similarly distributed in space, but they both scale superlinearly with environmental production. We develop theory that explains that as environmental productivity increases the ecological kinetics of diversity increases faster than expected because more complex environments are also more interactive. Using biogeographic databases of the global distributions of mammal species and human cultures we test a series of hypotheses derived from this theory and find support for each. For both mammals and cultures, we show that (1) both forms of diversity increase exponentially with ecological kinetics; (2) the kinetics of diversity is faster than the kinetics of productivity; (3) diversity scales superlinearly with environmental productivity; and (4) the kinetics of diversity is faster in increasingly productive environments. This biogeographic convergence is particularly striking because while the dynamics of biological and cultural evolution may be similar in principle the underlying mechanisms and time scales are very different. However, a common currency underlying all forms of diversity is ecological kinetics; the temperature-dependent fluxes of energy and biotic interactions that sustain all forms of life at all levels of organization. Diversity begets diversity in mammal species and human cultures because ecological kinetics drives superlinear scaling with environmental productivity.
Narrative historical linguistics (NHL) is considered as a valued contributor alongside history, archaeology, and genetics for an integrated study of human history. This chapter draws on work on the history of the vast Austronesian family, particularly its Oceanic subgroup. It discusses the working relation of NHL with other historical scholarship. The chapter focuses on relationships between languages and the ways in which the information on the relationships can be used to gain historical insights both on a world scale and on the language family scale. Probably the aspect of NHL best known to scholars outside NHL is the reconstruction of ancient lexicon and its use to establish the homeland and material culture of a protolanguage. The chapter draws heavily on plentiful and well‐researched reconstructions of the lexicons of Proto‐Austronesian, Proto‐Malayo‐Polynesian, and especially Proto‐Oceanic. It also discusses the future prospects for NHL.
Uniquely among animal communication systems, human language is simultaneously symbolic, richly structured, socially learned, dynamically diverse, and capable of expressing almost any meaning conceivable. This chapter examines what language‐related behavioral and cognitive traits humans share with other species. It is structured around two cognitive capacities that have played key roles in explanations of the origin and evolution of language, namely cooperation and imitation. The chapter explains why cooperative behavior, including sharing helpful information through linguistic communication, poses difficulties for evolutionary theory and reviews the extent of cooperation and related capacities such as theory of mind in primates. It considers the role of imitation, the basis of the transmission of cultural information, such as language, across generations. The chapter explores a recent shift in thinking towards integrating cultural processes in explanations of the biological evolution of cognitive traits.
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