Language change is paradoxical: Children acquire their native language accurately, yet over time, the language can change, apparently even without external influence. A possible resolution to this paradox comes from the facts that language is flexible and children do not learn from the entire population equally. Individuals vary in how they use their native language, and chance local fluctuatio...

human language, over its evolutionary history, has emerged as one of the fundamental defining characteristic of the modern man. however, this milestone evolutionary process through natural selection has not left any ’linguistic fossils’ that may enable us to trace back the actual course of development of language and its establishment in human societies. lacking analytical tools to fathom the cr...

in the name of allah, the compassionate, the merciful   my esteemed friends and colleagues from thousands of years ago, with the increase in the number of immigrants for finding new lands and then for trading, learning other languages became inevitable. from second half of the twentieth century, the ever increasing need for getting into communication with others, development in technological gr...

Abstract Discovering and quantifying the drivers of language change is a major challenge. Hypotheses about causal factors proliferate, but are difficult to rigorously test. Here we ask simple question: can 20th century changes in English be explained as consequence spatial diffusion, or have other processes created bias favour certain linguistic forms? Using two most comprehensive datasets avai...

Catalonia is an interesting site for language ideology research several reasons. It a multilingual and multicultural territory, where both Catalan Spanish enjoy the status of co-official language. Adding to this, over course last two decades there has been growing movement that called independence from Spain, one which frequently places linguistic concerns at its centre. Against this backdrop, ...