Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Traditionally, diachronic language change has been attributed to intra-linguistic factors, which, in analogy to genetic drift, result in diversification of languages as a consequence of the social and geographical separation of linguistic communities (Lupyan and Dale, 2016). More recently, extra-linguistic factors have been implicated in language change as languages adapt to ecological niches formed by geographic, demographic, and cultural characteristics of social environments (Dale and Lupyan, 2012; Reali et al., 2018). One way of conceptualizing these extra-linguistic factors is to distinguish linguistic communities along a continuum of variation in population size, geographical spread, and amount of contact with other languages: Inward-facing, esoteric communities have small populations with shared knowledge and little language contact whereas outward-facing, exoteric communities have large populations, assembled into diverse social networks with substantial amounts of non-shared knowledge and contact with other languages (Thurston, 1987; Wray and Grace, 2007).

Languages emerge in response to the negotiation of shared meaning in social groups, where transparency of grammar is necessitated by demands of communication with relative strangers needing to consult on a wide range of topics (Ragir 2002). This communal exchange is automated and stabilized through activity-dependent fine-tuning of information-specific neural connections during postnatal growth and social development.