Population Size and Language Change: An Evolutionary Perspective

There is increasing interest in the way that the size, composition, and envi-
ronment 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 evo-
lutionary 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 inter-
esting 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).