Preserving language diversity

Biolinguistics at the cutting edge: promises, achievements, and challenges.

The turn of the century witnessed key developments in biological sciences with profound implications both for biological theory and for the sciences of language. The decoding of the human genome showed that humans share with their closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, between 95% and 98% of their genes, depending on the methodology for establishing similarity. This finding threw doubt on the plausibility of the claim that the human language capacity is a consequence of a species-unique, genetically determined neurobiological innovation. Around the same time, it was shown that cultural variation is not unique to the human species; this was initially demonstrated with reference to chimpanzees, but it has since been shown that cultural variation and cultural transmission occurs in a variety of mammalian and avian species. In theoretical biology, the ‘Central Dogma’ of Neo-Darwinism was challenged by the (re-)emergence of ‘Evo-Devo’ and niche construction approaches to evolutionary processes. These developments have led to an increasing acceptance of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis that goes beyond, and in some crucial respects contradicts, the Neo-Darwinian modern synthesis of the mid-twentieth century. This recasting of evolutionary theory cannot fail to impact the foundations of biolinguistics. Over a roughly contemporaneous period, in the language sciences, the autonomy both of language as a “faculty”, and of grammar from meaning, has been challenged by cognitive linguistics and its more recent companion, cultural linguistics. Together, these developments of recent decades compel the recognition that biology and culture cannot be seen, as they largely were in the last century, as competing ‘causes’ of language and human cognition. A 21st century biolinguistics needs to accommodate the new findings in biology, language sciences (and related disciplines such as archaeology) through the elaboration of a biocultural linguistics that is fundamentally interdisciplinary and is situated in contemporary accounts of both human evolution and linguistic diversity. This chapter will outline the main features of a biocultural science of language, and address the complex and dynamical relationship between what all human languages have in common, in what ways they display variation, and how language variation is (and is not) situated in differences between cultures and societies.

Evolution: Education and Outreach, 2009

While human genetic variation is limited due to a bottleneck on the origin of the species ∼200 kya, cultural traits can change more rapidly, and may do so in response to the variation in human habitats. Does cultural diversification simulate a natural experiment in evolution much like biodiversity so that cultural divergences and convergences can be interpreted in terms of the differences and similarities of local environments? Or is cultural diversity simply the result of human behavioral flexibility? Although the majority of cultural data comes from the tips of the hominin phylogeny, anthropologists can follow the example of evolutionary ecologists, who often compare the endpoints of phylogenies when that is all that is available. This article compares 97 contemporary indigenous language communities from around the world, and 24 of their cultural traditions, to help determine whether human cultures and their cultural traits are proportionately dispersed, as predicted by the neutral theory of biodiversity, or whether they show non-proportionalities that could be explained with evolutionary reasoning.

Recent work has shown that language and other human cultural practices can be considered as evolutionary systems operating on the Darwinian principle of 'descent with modification'. An emerging field of interdisciplinary science builds on phylogenetic and other methods adopted from biology, and adapts them to explain the transmission histories of suites of cultural traits (whether languages, social structures, or artefacts). This theme issue asks what social processes lead to coupled and decoupled transmission of different cultural traits or suites of traits, and how their transmission histories can be estimated retrospectively using quantitative methods. Understanding the factors affecting descent histories is central to explaining how cultural diversity arises and how it is maintained. These questions are of interest and relevance not just to social science and evolutionary theory, but also to planners working on topics such as endangered language maintenance.

2010

Abstract Evolutionary approaches to cultural change are increasingly influential, and many scientists believe that a 'grand synthesis' is now in sight.

The study of linguistic diversity, and the factors driving change between language states, in different sociocultural contexts, arguably provides the best arena of human culture for the application of evolutionary approaches, as Darwin realized. After a long period in which this potential has been neglected, the scene is now set for a new re-connection of evolutionary approaches to the astonishingly diverse range of languages around the world, many on the verge of extinction without trace. This chapter outlines the various ways coevolutionary models can be applied to language change, and surveys the many ways diversity manifests itself both in language structure and in the organization of diversity beyond the language unit. Problems of establishing comparability and characterizing the full dimensions of the design space are discussed, including the distribution of characters across it, the correlations between them, and the challenge of establishing diachronic typologies (i.e., establishing the likelihood of different types of transition, including the insights that could be reached through properly focused studies of micro-variation). It concludes by surveying the main types of selection that mold the emergence of linguistic diversity—psychological/ physiological, system/semiotic, and genetic/ epidemiological—and spells out seven major challenges that confront further studies of linguistic diversity within an evolutionary framework.

The abundant evidence that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa within the past 200,000 years, and dispersed across the world only within the past 100,000 years, provides us with a strong framework in which to consider the evolution of human diversity. While there is evidence that the human capacity for culture has a deeper history, going beyond the origin of the hominin clade, the tendency for humans to form cultures as part of being distinct communities and populations changed markedly with the evolution of H. sapiens. In this paper, we investigate 'cultures' as opposed to 'culture', and the question of how and why, compared to biological diversity, human communities and populations are so culturally diverse. We consider the way in which the diversity of human cultures has developed since 100,000 years ago, and how its rate was subject to environmental factors. We argue that the causes of this diversity lie in the distribution of resources and the way in which human communities reproduce over several generations, leading to fissioning of kin groups. We discuss the consequences of boundary formation through culture in their broader ecological and evolutionary contexts.

Evolutionary approaches to cultural change are increasingly influential, and many scientists believe that a 'grand synthesis' is now in sight. The papers in this Theme Issue, which derives from a symposium held by the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity (University College London) in December 2008, focus on how the phylogenetic tree-building and network-based techniques used to estimate descent relationships in biology can be adapted to reconstruct cultural histories, where some degree of inter-societal diffusion will almost inevitably be superimposed on any deeper signal of a historical branching process. The disciplines represented include the three most purely 'cultural' fields from the four-field model of anthropology (cultural anthropology, archaeology and linguistic anthropology). In this short introduction, some context is provided from the history of anthropology, and key issues raised by the papers are highlighted.

Incorporating culture into an expanded theory of evolution will provide the foundation for a universal account of human diversity. Two requirements must be met. The first is to see learning as an extension of the processes of evolution. The second is to understand that there are specific components of human culture, viz. higher order knowledge structures and social constructions, which give rise to culture as invented knowledge. These components, which are products of psychological processes and mechanisms, make human culture different from the forms of shared knowledge observed in other species. One serious difficulty for such an expanded theory is that social constructions may not add to the fitness of all humans exposed to them. This may be because human culture has existed for only a relatively short time in evolutionary terms. Or it may be that, as some maintain, adaptation is a limited, even a flawed, aspect of evolutionary theory.

Endangered Turkic Languages, 2016

In this paper, we argue that diversity should not be advocated on the principle of “tolerance” – although we believe that tolerance is the first step leading to respect, understanding and acceptance - because the concept of tolerance alone can make diversity a less desired phenomenon. Instead, it should be promoted based on the principle of a “value per se”, which should take the perception of diversity beyond tolerance. Our claim is based on the assumption that promoting diversity as a tool which makes the world a more interesting and enjoyable place is a great argument, but not a sufficient one to encourage communities to take up ownership of their indigenous heritages The argument based solely on human rights and equal opportunities - however fundamental these concepts are for valuing diversity – is also conditionally plausible as opportunities are never equal and the question what would constitute linguistic humans rights is highly debatable. We argue therefore that the linguistic and cultural diversity should be embraced also because each language and culture is a unique mold shaping identity, self-recognition and self-appreciation. The loss of a contact with the native culture or language, as well as witnessing their decay, causes unrecoverable psychological pain for humans and therefore should be prevented. We also argue that linguistic and cultural diversity should be promoted as a socio-economic value and should be linked to accommodating socio-economic human needs. We call attention to the fact that linguistic and cultural diversity is transferable to a socio-economic capital, and if promoted as such, could create certain tangible opportunities to communities with indigenous languages and cultures.