Greenhill Simon J, Hua Xia, Welsh Caela F, Schneemann Hilde, Bromham Lindell
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia.
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPG), Jena, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2018 Apr 27;9:576. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00576. eCollection 2018.
What role does speaker population size play in shaping rates of language evolution? There has been little consensus on the expected relationship between rates and patterns of language change and speaker population size, with some predicting faster rates of change in smaller populations, and others expecting greater change in larger populations. The growth of comparative databases has allowed population size effects to be investigated across a wide range of language groups, with mixed results. One recent study of a group of Polynesian languages revealed greater rates of word gain in larger populations and greater rates of word loss in smaller populations. However, that test was restricted to 20 closely related languages from small Oceanic islands. Here, we test if this pattern is a general feature of language evolution across a larger and more diverse sample of languages from both continental and island populations. We analyzed comparative language data for 153 pairs of closely-related sister languages from three of the world's largest language families: Austronesian, Indo-European, and Niger-Congo. We find some evidence that rates of word loss are significantly greater in smaller languages for the Indo-European comparisons, but we find no significant patterns in the other two language families. These results suggest either that the influence of population size on rates and patterns of language evolution is not universal, or that it is sufficiently weak that it may be overwhelmed by other influences in some cases. Further investigation, for a greater number of language comparisons and a wider range of language features, may determine which of these explanations holds true.
说话者群体规模在塑造语言演变速度方面起什么作用？对于语言变化的速度和模式与说话者群体规模之间的预期关系，人们几乎没有达成共识，一些人预测较小群体中的变化速度更快，而另一些人则认为较大群体中的变化更大。比较数据库的发展使得能够在广泛的语言群体中研究群体规模的影响，结果好坏参半。最近一项对一组波利尼西亚语言的研究表明，较大群体中词汇增加的速度更快，而较小群体中词汇减少的速度更快。然而，该测试仅限于来自小大洋洲岛屿的20种密切相关的语言。在这里，我们测试这种模式是否是来自大陆和岛屿群体的更大、更多样化语言样本中语言演变的一个普遍特征。我们分析了来自世界上三个最大语系——南岛语系、印欧语系和尼日尔-刚果语系——的153对密切相关的姐妹语言的比较语言数据。我们发现一些证据表明，在印欧语系的比较中，较小语言中词汇减少的速度明显更快，但在其他两个语系中我们没有发现显著的模式。这些结果表明，要么群体规模对语言演变速度和模式的影响并非普遍存在，要么这种影响足够微弱，以至于在某些情况下可能会被其他影响因素所掩盖。进一步针对更多语言比较和更广泛语言特征的研究，可能会确定这些解释中哪一个是正确的。
