Linguistic Diversification and Rates of Change: Insights From a Diverse Sample of Sociolinguistic Studies

Abstract

Language diversification and change can be studied using phylogenetic modelling of families over thousands of years, or by close observation of changes unfolding over a few decades at the community level. While the phylogenetic approach uses data from hundreds of languages to make cross-linguistic generalisations, community-level studies of sociolinguistic variation have until recently been limited to a very narrow language sample. However this is now changing, with variationist studies published on a wider range of languages. In this article I assemble a sample of variationist studies encompassing 63 languages from 26 families, and explore potential patterns regarding rates of change in linguistic features, and which features are associated with social identity signalling, which may lead to diversification. These observations largely converge with results obtained from phylogenetic methods, suggesting that more systematic meta-analysis of variationist studies will provide a new way to investigate the evolutionary dynamics of language.