Rate of language evolution is affected by population size

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Volumn 112, Issue 7, 2015, Pages 2097-2102

  Bromham, Lindell ^a   Hua, Xia ^a   Fitzpatrick, Thomas G ^b   Greenhill, Simon J ^b  

^a AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

^b AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

Australian national university; Austronesian; Language evolution; Lexical change; Poisson regression; Sister pair comparison

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; FOUNDER EFFECT; HUMAN; LANGUAGE; LINGUISTICS; POISSON DISTRIBUTION; POLYNESIAN; POPULATION GROWTH; POPULATION SIZE; PRIORITY JOURNAL; LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT; POPULATION DENSITY;

HUMANS; LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT; POPULATION DENSITY;

EID: 84923197397     PISSN: 00278424     EISSN: 10916490     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1419704112     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. Levinson SC, Gray RD (2012) Tools from evolutionary biology shed new light on the diversification of languages. Trends Cogn Sci 16(3):167-173.
2. Nichols J (1997) Modeling ancient population structures and movement in linguistics. Annu Rev Anthropol 26:359-384.
3. Moran S, McCloy D, Wright R (2012) Revisiting population size vs. phoneme inventory size. Language 88(4):877-893.
4. Nettle D (1999) Is the rate of linguistic change constant? Lingua 108(2):119-136.
5. Bowern C (2010) Correlates of language change in hunter-gatherer and other 'small' languages. Lang Linguist Compass 4(8):665-679.
6. Wichmann S, Holman EW (2009) Population size and rates of language change. Hum Biol 81(2-3):259-274.
7. Nettle D (2012) Social scale and structural complexity in human languages. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 367(1597):1829-1836.
8. Henrich J (2004) Demography and cultural evolution: how adaptive cultural processes can produce maladaptive losses: The Tasmanian case. Am Antiq 69(2):197-214.
9. Kline MA, Boyd R (2010) Population size predicts technological complexity in Oceania. Proc Biol Sci 277(1693):2559- 2564.
10. Collard M, Ruttle A, Buchanan B, O' Brien MJ (2013) Population size and cultural evolution in nonindustrial food-producing societies. PLoS ONE 8(9):e72628.
11. Trudgill P (2004) Linguistic and social typology: The Austronesian migrations and phoneme inventories. Linguist Typol 8(3):305-320.
12. Atkinson QD (2011) Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa. Science 332(6027):346-349.
13. Atkinson QD, Meade A, Venditti C, Greenhill SJ, Pagel M (2008) Languages evolve in punctuational bursts. Science 319(5863):588.
14. Lupyan G, Dale R (2010) Language structure is partly determined by social structure. PLoS ONE 5(1):e8559.
15. Swadesh M (1952) Lexico-statistic dating of prehistoric ethnic contacts: With special reference to North American Indians and Eskimos. Proc Am Philos Soc 96(4):452-463.
16. Rama T (2013) Phonotactic diversity predicts the time depth of the world' s language families. PLoS ONE 8(5):e63238.
17. Swadesh M (1955) Towards greater accuracy in lexicostatistic dating. Int J Am Linguist 21(2):121-137.
18. Thomason SG, Kaufman T (1988) Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (Univ of California Press, Oakland, CA).
19. Pagel M, Atkinson QD, Meade A (2007) Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history. Nature 449(7163):717-720.
20. Mesoudi A, Whiten A, Laland KN (2006) Towards a unified science of cultural evolution. Behav Brain Sci 29(4):329-347, discussion 347-383.
21. Gray RD, Atkinson QD, Greenhill SJ (2011) Language evolution and human history: What a difference a date makes. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 366(1567):1090-1100.
22. Wichmann S, Stauffer D, Schulze C, Holman EW (2008) Do language change rates depend on population size? Adv Complex Syst 11(3):357-369.
23. Roberts S, Winters J (2013) Linguistic diversity and traffic accidents: Lessons from statistical studies of cultural traits. PLoS ONE 8(8):e70902.
24. Ladd DR, Roberts SG, Dediu D (2015) Correlational studies in typological and historical linguistics. Annu Rev Linguistics 1(1):4.1-4.21.
25. Lanfear R, Welch JJ, Bromham L (2010) Watching the clock: Studying variation in rates of molecular evolution between species. Trends Ecol Evol 25(9):495-503.
26. Welch JJ, Waxman D (2008) Calculating independent contrasts for the comparative study of substitution rates. J Theor Biol 251(4):667-678.
27. Greenhill SJ, Blust R, Gray RD (2008) The Austronesian basic vocabulary database: From bioinformatics to lexomics. Evol Bioinform Online 4:271-283.
28. Greenhill SJ, Clark R (2011) POLLEX-Online: The Polynesian lexicon project online. Oceanic Linguist 50(2):551-559.
29. Gray RD, Drummond AJ, Greenhill SJ (2009) Language phylogenies reveal expansion pulses and pauses in Pacific settlement. Science 323(5913):479-483.
30. Wilmshurst JM, Hunt TL, Lipo CP, Anderson AJ (2011) High-precision radiocarbon dating shows recent and rapid initial human colonization of East Polynesia. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108(5):1815-1820.
31. Marck JC (2000) Topics in Polynesian Language and Culture History (Pacific Linguistics, Canberra, Australia).
32. Kirch PV (1984) The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms (Cambridge Univ Press, Cambridge, UK).
33. Pawley A (1967) The relationships of Polynesian Outlier languages. J Polyn Soc 76(3): 259-296.
34. Pawley A, Ross M (1995) The prehistory of Oceanic languages: A current view. The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, eds Bellwood P, Fox JJ, Tryon D (Australian National University, Canberra, Australia), pp 43-80.
35. Tadmor U, Haspelmath M, Taylor B (2010) Borrowability and the notion of basic vocabulary. Diachronica 27(2):226-246.
36. Brown BW, Lovato J, Russel K, Halvorsen KB (2012) Asypow: Calculate power utilizing asymptotic likelihood ratio methods. R package version 2012.04-1. Available at CRAN. R-project.org/package=asypow.
37. Kirch PV, Rallu J-L (2007) The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies: Archaeological and Demographic Perspectives (Univ of Hawaii Press, Honolulu).
38. Trudgill P (2011) Social structure and phoneme inventories. Linguist Typol 15(2): 155-160.
39. Reali F, Griffiths TL (2010) Words as alleles: Connecting language evolution with Bayesian learners to models of genetic drift. Proc Biol Sci 277(1680):429-436.
40. Hunley K, Bowern C, Healy M (2012) Rejection of a serial founder effects model of genetic and linguistic coevolution. Proc Biol Sci 279(1736):2281-2288.
41. Pawley A (1966) Polynesian languages: A subgrouping based on shared innovations in morphology. J Polyn Soc 75(1):39-64.
42. Durie M, Ross M, eds (1996) The Comparative Method Reviewed: Regularity and Irregularity in Language Change (Oxford Univ Press, Oxford).
43. th Ed. Available at www.ethnologue.com.
44. Næss Å, Hovdhaugen E (2011) A Grammar of Vaeakau-Taumako (Walter de Gruyter, Göttingen, Germany).
45. Nunn PD (2007) Climate, Environment and Society in the Pacific in the Last Millennium (Elsevier, Oxford).
46. Kirch PV (1984) The Polynesian outliers: Continuity, change, and replacement. J Pac Hist 19(4):224-238.
47. Dunn M, Greenhill SJ, Levinson SC, Gray RD (2011) Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. Nature 473(7345):79-82.
48. Blust R (2000) Why lexicostatistics doesn't work: The 'universal constant' hypothesis and the Austronesian languages. Time Depth in Historical Linguistics, eds Renfrew C, McMahon A, Trask L (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, UK), pp 311-331.
49. Greenhill SJ (2011) Levenshtein distances fail to identify language relationships accurately. Comput Linguist 37:689-698.
50. PagelM, Meade A (2006) Estimating rates of lexical replacement on phylogenetic trees of languages. Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages, eds Forster P, Renfrew C (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, UK).
51. Greenhill SJ, Atkinson QD, Meade A, Gray RD (2010) The shape and tempo of language evolution. Proc Biol Sci 277(1693):2443-2450.
52. Greenhill SJ, Gray RD (2012) Basic vocabulary and Bayesian phylolinguistics: Issues of understanding and representation. Diachronica 29(4):523-537.
53. Greenhill SJ, Currie TE, Gray RD (2009) Does horizontal transmission invalidate cultural phylogenies? Proc Biol Sci 276(1665):2299-2306.
54. Tajima F (1993) Simple methods for testing the molecular evolutionary clock hypothesis. Genetics 135(2):599-607.
55. Bromham L, Penny D, Rambaut A, Hendy MD (2000) The power of relative rates tests depends on the data. J Mol Evol 50(3):296-301.
56. Mace R, Pagel M (1994) The comparative method in anthropology. Curr Anthropol 35(5):549-564.
57. Murray-McIntosh RP, Scrimshaw BJ, Hatfield PJ, Penny D (1998) Testing migration patterns and estimating founding population size in Polynesia by using human mtDNA sequences. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 95(15):9047-9052.
58. Waldhör T, Haidinger G, Schober E (1998) Comparison of R2 measures for Poisson regression by simulation. J Epidemiol Biostat 3:209-215.