Evolution and Language: Overview

community The close relationship between biological evolution and language was noted by Darwin himself in an oft-quoted passage from The Descent of Man: ‘the formation of different languages and of different species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel ’ (Darwin 1882). In fact, the development of evolutionary theory in biology was inspired in part by the advances in historical linguistics in the early 19th century. In the 20th century, evolutionary theory did not have much influence on linguistics, in part due to the advent of structuralism and the focus on synchronic linguistic analysis. In the past two decades, there has been a considerable increase in interest in the relationship between language and evolution. The interest has been manifested in three areas of recent research. The first is the evolutionary origin of the human language capacity, a topic that was actively avoided in linguistics for a century. The second is the employment of techniques of phylogeny reconstruction from biology in the analysis of genetic families of languages. Finally, there is the applicatio