Oct. 11, 2007 — Scientists have uncovered what might be called the law of language evolution: the more a word is used, the less likely it is to change over time.
Like genes, words undergo ruthless survival-of-the-fittest pressure and those that are less central to daily life are subject to mutation, according to their study.
Their research applies mathematical precision to four very different Indo-European languages.
But if it also holds for other languages, it would be a milestone in understanding one of humanity's defining attributes.
Much like the evolutionary theory of Darwin, who was himself intrigued by the concept of a linguistic family tree, the new findings show how individuals can unwittingly influence changes in the "species" of their shared mother tongue.
Language signals societal changes since 9/11.
Get more Discovery News video here.
The paper, published today in the journal Nature, reveals a link between the word's frequency of use and its stability of form and meaning over time. This applies across a spectrum of languages.
Researchers led by Professor Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, U.K., looked at how 200 basic words diverged over thousands of years among English, Russian, Greek and Spanish.
Much as in evolutionary biology, the entire family of 87 Indo-European languages spoken today are thought to share a common origin reaching back some 10,000 years.
Very commonly used words — two or water, for example — remain recognizably related across this vast linguistic spectrum, they found. But others words that occur less frequently in daily speech, even if they are hardly obscure, have changed profoundly over centuries and millennia.
