Language evolution

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.

Joseph Jastrow published a gestural theory of the evolution of language in the seventh volume of Science, 1886.

The field re-appeared in 1988 in the Linguistic Bibliography as a subfield of psycholinguistics. In 1990, Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom published their paper "Natural Language and Natural Selection" which strongly argued for an adaptationist approach to language origins. Development strengthened further with the establishment (in 1996) of a series of conferences on the Evolution of Language (subsequently known as "Evolang"), promoting a scientific, multi-disciplinary approach to the issue, and interest from major academic publishers (e.g., the Studies in the Evolution of Language series has appeared with Oxford University Press since 2001) and from scientific journals.

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