2016/01/01 by Harald Hammarström · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Language and cultural evolution #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/jole/lzw002
openalex publication_date 2016/01/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
What would your ideas about language evolution be if there was only one language left on earth? Fortunately, our investigation need not be that impoverished. In the present article, we survey the state of knowledge regarding the kinds of language found among humans, the language inventory, population sizes, time depth, grammatical variation, and other relevant issues that a theory of language evolution should minimally take into account.