Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure

Abstract

BackgroundLanguages differ greatly both in their syntactic and morphological systems and in the social environments in which they exist. We challenge the view that language grammars are unrelated to social environments in which they are learned and used.Methodology/Principal FindingsWe conducted a statistical analysis of >2,000 languages using a combination of demographic sources and the World Atlas of Language Structures— a database of structural language properties. We found strong relationships between linguistic factors related to morphological complexity, and demographic/socio-historical factors such as the number of language users, geographic spread, and degree of language contact. The analyses suggest that languages spoken by large groups have simpler inflectional morphology than languages spoken by smaller groups as measured on a variety of factors such as case systems and complexity of conjugations. Additionally, languages spoken by large groups are much more likely to use lexical strategies in place of inflectional morphology to encode evidentiality, negation, aspect, and possession. Our findings indicate that just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used. As adults learn a language, features that are difficult for them to acquire, are less likely to be passed on to subsequent learners. Languages used for communication in large groups that include adult learners appear to have been subjected to such selection. Conversely, the morphological complexity common to languages used in small groups increases redundancy which may facilitate language learning by infants.Conclusions/SignificanceWe hypothesize that language structures are subjected to different evolutionary pressures in different social environments. Just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used. The proposed Linguistic Niche Hypothesis has implications for answering the broad question of why languages differ in the way they do and makes empirical predictions regarding language acquisition capacities of children versus adults.

Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots

“…For example, linguistic diversity is correlated with biodiversity (57) and pathogen prevalence (58), and morphological complexity is related to population size (59). Our results are further suggestive of external influences on language.…”

Achieving Compositional Language in a Population of Iterated Learners

“…Support for the ILM and the role of learner bias in language change has come about in recent years from both iterated learning experiments involving human participants, which have supported much of the work previously done with computational simulation (Kalish et al, 2007;Kirby et al, 2008), and from other methods of research such as the statistical analysis work of Lupyan and Dale (2010), who found that languages that are spoken by larger groups of individuals, such as modern English, tend to have simpler inflectional morphology 2 than those spoken by smaller groups.…”

Rate of language evolution is affected by population size

“…morpho-syntactic change, and semantic change (12,14,47). We used the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database (27), which records up to 210 basic semantic units for more than 1,100 languages spoken in the Pacific region.…”

“…Rates of change might be accelerated by founder effects when a new population is started from a small number of colonists, which could result in loss of elements from the ancestral language (11)(12)(13). Population size might also influence language complexity if small populations can develop greater linguistic complexity (11), whereas large, widespread languages that are often learned by adults may become simplified (14). Conversely, it has been suggested that the average rate of word turnover is essentially the same in all languages (15)(16)(17), or that it is determined primarily by other factors such as language contact (6,18).…”