Quentin Atkinson: University of Oxford Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology

Languages, like species, evolve. Words and phrases compete for our favour in a struggle for existence that is analogous to natural selection. Words that survive are passed on from generation to generation in a process of descent with modification. This process has generated the thousands of languages we see in the world today. In this talk I will discuss how methods and theory from evolutionary biology can be applied to linguistic data to shed light on the ancestry of extant languages and the processes that have given rise to modern human language diversity.