The dynamics of norm change in the cultural evolution of language

Abstract

What happens when a new social convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change-such as institutions or committed activists-have been identified for a long time, little is known about how a population adopts a new convention, due to the difficulties of finding representative data. Here, we address this issue by looking at changes that occurred to 2,541 orthographic and lexical norms in English and Spanish through the analysis of a large corpora of books published between the years 1800 and 2008. We detect three markedly distinct patterns in the data, depending on whether the behavioral change results from the action of a formal institution, an informal authority, or a spontaneous process of unregulated evolution. We propose a simple evolutionary model able to capture all of the observed behaviors, and we show that it reproduces quantitatively the empirical data. This work identifies general mechanisms of norm change, and we anticipate that it will be of interest to researchers investigating the cultural evolution of language and, more broadly, human collective behavior.

The natural selection of words: Finding the features of fitness

“…Amato et al [27] consider how linguistic norms evolve over time. Their aim is to distinguish spontaneous change in norms from change that is imposed by centralized institutions.…”

Fading of collective attention shapes the evolution of linguistic variants

“…Starting approximately in 1800, written word usage reveals a monotonic decay of the form -se, which is replaced by the form -ra that dominates the Spanish subjunctive to this day. The model by Amato and collaborators (2) can explain these dynamics, since it predicts monotonic trajectories of competing populations. However, as one goes back in the history of the subjunctive, as we detail below, one finds a non-monotonic dependence with a transition in which the form -se increases its popularity, which is then followed indeed by a slow and progressive decay in which the formra takes over again.…”

“…The integration of the two basic mechanisms of imitation and attention to novelty allows to understand diverse competing objects, with lifetimes that range from hours for memes and news (7, 8) to decades for verbs, suggesting the existence of a general mechanism underlying cultural evolution.Alternative linguistic forms such as synonyms (garbage-rubbish), spelling differences (behaviorbehaviour) or past-tense regularization (spilt-spilled) are in constant tension and present a unique case to study the dynamics of cultural transitions (2,9). This rivalry between competing cultural expressions occurs in a time-scale of centuries or decades, but similar phenomena can be observed also in the time scale of hours for memes (8) and days in news (7).Cultural transitions have been modeled with a variety of approaches going from formal and normative approaches (8, 10) to some that explicitly incorporate the cognitive mechanisms that may produce them (2,7,11,12). Distinct versions of the cognitive approach have proposed three mechanisms that account the fading of certain cultural forms, being replaced by alternative versions which dominate the scene: 1) limited attention, 2) imitation, and 3) preference for novelty or adaptation (7).…”

“…Recently, a specific mathematical model (2) was proposed to explore transitions in language which included the Spanish subjunctive. This presents a quite privileged window to investigate cultural rivalry because it comes in two virtually perfectly exchangeable variants (13)(14)(15)(16)) (ended in -ra orse, as in cantara and cantase, from the verb cantar, to sing), which allows to isolate and model specifically the selection forces that bias the speakers towards either alternative.…”

“…One century later, in 1713, the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) was conceived as the official institution responsible for overseeing the Spanish language and promote linguistic unity within and across Spanish-speaking territories (2,4). The Academy produced a global standardization process that enforced the official spelling of a number of linguistic forms, including -ra and -se as completely interchangeable variants of the past subjunctive in any context, without change of meaning (5,17,18).…”