Friday, January 29, 2010

Language Structure Is Partly Determined By Social Structure

Geographic distribution of the 2,236 languages included in the present study. (Credit: Lupyan G, Dale R (2010), PLoS One, 10.1371/journal.pone.0008559.g001)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Jan. 28, 2010) — Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Memphis have released a new study on linguistic evolution that challenges the prominent hypothesis for why languages differ throughout the world.

The study argues that human languages may adapt more like biological organisms than previously thought and that the more common and popular the language, the simpler its construction to facilitate its survival.

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