Population size and language change: an evolutionary perspective

There is increasing interest in the way that the size, composition and environment of populations influence the way that their languages evolve. Evolutionary biologists might be able to contribute to this debate in a couple of ways. Firstly, some of the relevant hypotheses rest explicitly or implicitly on theories developed in evolutionary biology, so it is important to critically evaluate the fit of those theories to language change. Secondly, methods developed in evolutionary biology can be applied to testing these hypotheses. In this talk, I will outline a number of projects where we have applied evolutionary analyses to case studies in language evolution, including rates of word gain and loss, variation in phoneme inventory size, island languages diversity, and the origins and maintenance of polysynthesis. 

About the speaker

Professor Lindell Bromham is an evolutionary biologist in the Research School for Biology at the ANU. Bromham specializes in macroevolution, molecular evolution and, most recently, the evolution of languages. Using population genetics methods in joint work, Bromham provided the world’s first empirical model of how a new language emerges. This work won the 2021 Eureka Award for Interdisciplinary Scientific Research. In subsequent work, Bromham and others showed how general patterns of language endangerment scale-up from community-level case studies to a global context.