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Language Change
Linguistics had genealogies of descent before biology did, and described them in the vocabulary of growth and decay. Its history runs from that developmental language to descent, and its modern practitioners disagree over how much of the Darwinian apparatus the change of languages carries.
Genealogy before Darwin
The comparative method begins with William Jones’s discourse to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta (1786), which found Sanskrit, Greek and Latin to bear “a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident”. Franz Bopp’s systematic comparison of their verb systems (1816), Rasmus Rask’s regular sound correspondences (1818) and Jacob Grimm’s statement of the Germanic consonant shift (1822) made relationship a matter of regular correspondence rather than resemblance. August Schleicher gave the relationships a shape, drawing the Indo-European family as a tree in 1853, and reconstructed the parent language from its daughters.
The vocabulary was not Darwinian. Schleicher held languages to be natural organisms that grow in prehistory and decline in history, a scheme he took from Hegel; Max Müller spoke of the growth and decay of language; and a study of the terms in nineteenth-century linguistics finds that after 1859 most linguists went on using “evolution” in its pre-Darwinian sense, of development. The field had descent, genealogical classification and reconstruction, and no mechanism of selection.
The exchange with Darwin
Darwin used languages in the Origin (1859) to illustrate genealogical classification: “If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world.” Schleicher (1863) returned the point: linguistics already had an actual tree of descent built from evidence, where the Origin had only an abstract diagram. In The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin set out the parallel in detail: “The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously the same.” Languages are classed in groups under groups, carry rudiments, spread and extinguish one another, and once extinct never reappear. He quoted Müller, “A struggle for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language”, and concluded that “the survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.” Müller himself accepted selection among words within languages, not the descent of the faculty.
Institutions, sound laws and waves
The organism did not last long in the field. William Dwight Whitney, in The Life and Growth of Language (1875), held that languages are institutions, made and changed by their speakers, and that their study is a moral rather than a physical science. The neogrammarians located change in individual speakers and stated its regularity as law. Hermann Osthoff and Karl Brugmann’s preface to Morphologische Untersuchungen (1878) declared that “every sound change, insofar as it proceeds mechanically, takes place according to exceptionless laws”, with analogy accounting for the apparent exceptions, and Hermann Paul codified the programme in Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (1880). Johannes Schmidt, Schleicher’s student, challenged the tree in 1872 with the wave model, in which innovations spread outward from a centre across a continuum of dialects like waves, weakening with distance.
Saussure’s two axes
Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) first named its two axes static and evolutionary linguistics, linguistique statique and linguistique évolutive, before settling on synchronic and diachronic. The Cours recalled the earlier period, when language “was considered a specific sphere, a fourth natural kingdom”, and made the system at a moment the centre of the discipline.
The modern field’s answers
The question returned in the late twentieth century, and the field’s answers spread across the whole range of the apparatus. At the full end, William Croft’s Explaining Language Change: An Evolutionary Approach (2000) builds a theory of utterance selection on David Hull’s general analysis of selection: the lingueme, a linguistic unit in an utterance, is the replicator, the speaker is the interactor, innovation has functional causes and propagation social ones. Salikoko Mufwene treats a language as a population of idiolects drawing on a pool of features in contact, and Mark Pagel describes language as a culturally transmitted replicator whose words are replaced at rates that frequency of use predicts. Phylogenetic linguistics takes biology’s methods rather than its mechanism, applying Bayesian tree inference to language families such as Indo-European (Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson, 2003). Rudi Keller’s On Language Change (1994) explains change by an invisible hand, language as the result of human action but not of human design, without selection. Roger Lass, who brought “exaptation” into linguistics, holds that languages are not biological systems in any deep sense and warns against borrowed biology as metaphor.
Whether the capacity for language evolved, and how, is a different question, about biological evolution in the strict sense; it is argued under Nativism.
See also: Evolution (the subject landing) · The criterion · Schleicher · Saussure · Darwin · Hull · Cultural extensions of Darwinism · Nativism