The Dynamics of Norm Change in the Cultural Evolution of Language

TL;DR

This study analyzes how social conventions in language change over time by examining large corpora, identifying distinct patterns based on different influencing factors, and proposing a model that captures these dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of language norm change using empirical data and presents a unifying evolutionary model for different change mechanisms.

Findings

Three distinct patterns of norm change identified

Model reproduces empirical data quantitatively

Different mechanisms influence language evolution

Abstract

What happens when a new social convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change - such as institutions or committed activists - have been identified since a long time, little is known about how a population adopts a new convention, due to the difficulties of finding representative data. Here we address this issue by looking at changes occurred to 2,541 orthographic and lexical norms in English and Spanish through the analysis of a large corpora of books published between the years 1800 and 2008. We detect three markedly distinct patterns in the data, depending on whether the behavioral change results from the action of a formal institution, an informal authority or a spontaneous process of unregulated evolution. We propose a simple evolutionary model able to capture all the observed behaviors and we show that it reproduces quantitatively the empirical data. This work identifies general mechanisms of norm change and we anticipate that it will be of interest to researchers investigating the cultural evolution of language and, more broadly, human collective behavior.