Population Size and the Rate of Language Evolution: A Test Across Indo-European, Austronesian, and Bantu Languages

Abstract

What role does speaker population size play in shaping rates of language evolution? There has been little consensus on the expected relationship between rates and patterns of language change and speaker population size, with some predicting faster rates of change in smaller populations, and others expecting greater change in larger populations. The growth of comparative databases has allowed population size effects to be investigated across a wide range of language groups, with mixed results. One recent study of a group of Polynesian languages revealed greater rates of word gain in larger populations and greater rates of word loss in smaller populations. However, that test was restricted to 20 closely related languages from small Oceanic islands. Here, we test if this pattern is a general feature of language evolution across a larger and more diverse sample of languages from both continental and island populations. We analyzed comparative language data for 153 pairs of closely-related sister languages from three of the world's largest language families: Austronesian, Indo-European, and Niger-Congo. We find some evidence that rates of word loss are significantly greater in smaller languages for the Indo-European comparisons, but we find no significant patterns in the other two language families. These results suggest either that the influence of population size on rates and patterns of language evolution is not universal, or that it is sufficiently weak that it may be overwhelmed by other influences in some cases. Further investigation, for a greater number of language comparisons and a wider range of language features, may determine which of these explanations holds true.

Linguistic system and sociolinguistic environment as competing factors in linguistic variation: A typological approach

“…6 Population size has become a widely used variable especially in research on language evolution and linguistic diversification (e.g. Lupyan and Dale 2010; see also the excellent review in Greenhill et al 2018 and the references there). Proportion of L2 speakers is not as widely used as a variable owing largely to limitations in data availability, but it is a more direct proxy for effects from intensive language contact on language structure.…”

“…Hypotheses about social conditions influencing rates of change have also appeared in evolutionary linguistic research and researchers have begun to test whether rates of change depend on sociolinguistic conditions, such as population size (e.g. Bowern 2010, Greenhill et al 2018, Grollemund et al 2015. In research on cultural evolution, demographic factors, such as population size, play also crucial role since they may influence the rate of cultural innovations, including linguistic ones (Richerson et al 2009).…”

Eliciting Big Data From Small, Young, or Non-standard Languages: 10 Experimental Challenges

“…At the same time, the influence of population size on speed of change is not uniform. A recent comparative study confirmed that rates of word loss are significantly greater in smaller languages, but only for the Indo-European family; no effect was found for small languages from other families such as Austronesian or Niger-Congo (Greenhill et al, 2018). This led to the conclusion that either the influence of population size on change rate is not universal or it is weak enough to be mollifiable by other influences (Greenhill et al, 2018).…”

Tkol, Httt, and r/radiohead: High Affinity Terms in Reddit Communities

“…These results provide insight into how the concept of "population" works in online spaces in contrast to physical communities. Previous works show a weak correlation between population of a geographic area and the occurrence of language evolution (Bromham et al, 2015;Greenhill et al, 2018). A limitation of these studies was their inability to account for language output that was not written (i.e, oral communications).…”