Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Linguists speculate that human languages often evolve in rapid or punctuational bursts, sometimes associated with their emergence from other languages, but this phenomenon has never been demonstrated. We used vocabulary data from three of the world's major language groups -- Bantu, Indo-European, and Austronesian -- to show that 10 to 33\% of the overall vocabulary differences among these languages arose from rapid bursts of change associated with language-splitting events. Our findings identify a general tendency for increased rates of linguistic evolution in fledgling languages, perhaps arising from a linguistic founder effect or a desire to establish a distinct social identity.

While Noah Webster may have produced the earliest compendium on American English, the divergence from British English dates from much earlier. Long before the publication of Webster's Dictionary in 1806, pronunciation in America and in Britain had begun to differ (1, 2). The Dictionary thus does not mark a fixed point when all Americans shifted abruptly from British to American English. The speciation, rather, was gradual, because individual speakers change gradually, by increments, in their lifetimes; individual changes also spread gradually from speaker to speaker.