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Annual Review of Linguistics

Volume 11, 2025

Population Size and Language Change: An Evolutionary Perspective

  • Lindell Bromham1
  • Macroevolution & Macroecology, Research School of Biology, Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 11:183-208 (Volume publication date February 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on October 30, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

There is increasing interest in the way that the size, composition, and environment of populations influence the way that their languages evolve. There are two reasons why an exploration of population and language change from the perspective of evolutionary biology might be useful. First, 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 these theories to language change. Second, methods developed in evolutionary biology have been applied to evaluating these hypotheses. Instead of aiming for a comprehensive review of the interaction between population size and language change, the focus of this review is on analogies drawn to processes in biological evolution (e.g., founder effects), processes that may have interesting parallels in both species and languages (e.g., evolution of complexity in small populations), and techniques from evolutionary biology that have been applied to language data (e.g., Wright-Fisher models).

Keyword(s): complexity, genetic drift, natural selection, phylogenetic, rates of change, sister pairs, Wright-Fisher
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Population Size and Language Change: An Evolutionary Perspective
Annual Review of Linguistics 11, 183 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031422-123959
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