the biological origin of linguistic diversity

plosone | In contrast with animal communication systems, diversity is characteristic of almost every aspect of human language. Languages variously employ tones, clicks, or manual signs to signal differences in meaning; some languages lack the noun-verb distinction (e.g., Straits Salish), whereas others have a proliferation of fine-grained syntactic categories (e.g., Tzeltal); and some languages do without morphology (e.g., Mandarin), while others pack a whole sentence into a single word (e.g., Cayuga). A challenge for evolutionary biology is to reconcile the diversity of languages with the high degree of biological uniformity of their speakers. Here, we model processes of language change and geographical dispersion and find a consistent pressure for flexible learning, irrespective of the language being spoken. This pressure arises because flexible learners can best cope with the observed high rates of linguistic change associated with divergent cultural evolution following human migration. Thus, rather than genetic adaptations for specific aspects of language, such as recursion, the coevolution of genes and fast-changing linguistic structure provides the biological basis for linguistic diversity. Only biological adaptations for flexible learning combined with cultural evolution can explain how each child has the potential to learn any human language.

Linguistic diversity and the biological basis of language have traditionally been treated separately, with the nature and origin of the latter being the focus of much debate. One influential proposal argues in favour of a special-purpose biological language system by analogy to the visual system [10]–[13]. Just as vision is crucial in navigating the physical environment, language is fundamental to navigating our social environment. Other scientists have proposed that language instead relies on domain-general neural mechanisms evolved for other purposes [14]–[16]. Just as reading relies on neural mechanisms that pre-date the emergence of writing [17], so perhaps language has evolved to rely on pre-existing brain systems. However, there is more agreement about the origin of linguistic diversity, which is typically attributed to divergent cultural evolution following human migration [9]. As small groups of hunter-gatherers dispersed geographically, first within and later beyond Africa [18], their languages also diverged [19].

Here, we present a theoretical model of the relationship between linguistic diversity and the biological basis for language. Importantly, the model assigns an important role to linguistic change, which has been extraordinarily rapid during historical times; e.g., the entire Indo-European language group diverged from a common source in less than 10,000 years [20]. Through numerical simulations, we determine the circumstances under which the diversity of human language can be reconciled with a largely uniform biological basis that enables each child to learn any language. First, we explore the consequences of an initially stable population splitting into two geographically separate groups. Second, we look at the scenario in which such groups are not fully separated, but continue to interact to varying degrees. Third, we consider the possibility that linguistic principles are not entirely unconstrained, but are partly determined by pre-existing genetic biases. Fourth, we investigate the possibility of a linguistic “snowball effect,” whereby linguistic change was originally slow–allowing for the evolution of a genetically specified protolanguage–but gradually increased across generations. In each of these scenarios, we find that the evolution of a genetic predisposition to accommodate rapid cultural evolution of linguistic structure is key to reconciling the diversity of human language with a largely uniform biological basis for learning language.