Evolutionary linguistics

Evolutionary linguistics is a subfield of psycholinguistics that studies the psychosocial and cultural factors involved in the origin of language and the development of linguistic universals. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves practically no traces. This led to the abandonment of the field for more than a century, despite the common origins of language hinted at by the evolutionary relationships among individual languages established by the field of historical linguistics. Since the late 1980s, the field has been revived in the wake of progress made in the related fields of Biolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology, universal grammar, and cognitive science.

Inspired by the natural sciences, especially by biology, August Schleicher (1821–1868) became the first to compare changing languages to evolving species. He introduced the representation of language families as an evolutionary tree (Stammbaumtheorie) in articles published in 1853.Stammbaumtheorie proved very productive for comparative linguistics, but did not solve the major problem of studying the origin of language: the lack of fossil records. Some scholars abandoned the question of the origin of language as unsolvable. Famously, the Société Linguistique de Paris in 1866 refused to admit any further papers on the subject.

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