There are some aspects of human language that seem so similar to biological systems that its easy and fairly natural to see an analogy between linguistics and biology:
- The arbitrary building blocks of language -- the consonants and vowels -- mutate and recombine across generations in a quasi-steady progression of change over time.
- A set of "competing" mutations in the sound patterns and lexicon can be active at the same time in a given population.
- Environmental factors can accelerate or slow the apparent rate at which certain mutations take hold in larger portions of the population.
- The equivalent of "micro-evolution", observable within our own life-spans (yielding differences in speech patterns among younger vs. older speakers, for instance), is a microcosm and in fact a snap-shot of the more extended "macro-evolution" that causes language communities to become "incompatible" with one another (they diverge beyond a point of mutual intelligibility).
- The full linguistic system of any given individual is highly complex, its development over the individual's life span involves critical growth periods that crucially depend on (and directly reflect) environmental influences, and it's end result is every bit as unique to the individual as the fingerprint and DNA patterns.
- For the vast majority of individuals, the nature of language acquisition -- learning first from immediate family members, then from the community that contains the family -- results in patterns of language behavior that closely reflect the patterns of genetic relatedness across generations.
With all that, however, there are some factors that make language "evolution" profoundly different from biological evolution:
- Facility with language is a "corollary" attribute in individuals, which depends on the genetic features that select (in a more general way) for larger brains, more flexible brain chemistry, etc, and these genetic features (I would expect) affect natural selection in general ways -- better response times, more flexible responses, a broader potential for innovative behaviors of all sorts (not just better communication via language).
- There is no genetic or biological determination of the particular language(s) that an individual can speak; your genetics only dictate that you will learn and use a language, but it can be any human language -- and of course, it can be more than one. Therefore, the notion of "natural selection", if applied to languages, has virtually no biological factor involved.
- The factors that affect/effect the survival and propagation of a language (or of particular features of a language, such as word selection for a particular meaning, or pronunciation for particular word classes sharing a common vowel or consonant) are so varied and poorly understood that the "activators" of language change are essentially beyond study; they constitute a seemingly irreducible randomness.
A lot of concern has been voiced recently about a general trend of language extinction: lots of languages spoken by relatively small communities are being abandoned or forced out by predominant social/political forces that coerce many groups into adopting one of a relatively small set of "controlling" languages. Many linguists view this as an unfortunate parallel to the equally disturbing increase in species extinctions now being observed. But again, I think the analogy breaks down: I think there is good evidence to support the notion that more diversity in biological species is "better" (in some general, global sense) than less diversity, but it's not at all clear to me whether this argument holds for languages.
In both domains, though, I think it's the case that periods of less diversity simply alternate with periods of greater diversity, and our tendency to label one "good" and the other "bad" can seem a bit silly.
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.
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