The evolution of languages is a subject that parallels biological evolution in important ways. Obviously in the history of a culture, language is inextricably linked to the movements and progress of its people. In that way it can be said to overlap with population genetics. We can track the divergences of human populations by comparing the similarities among their languages the same way we can determine interrelations through genetic means.
Creationists no longer argue that languages could not have evolved. They have wisely abandoned the Babel myth that stands in direct contradiction to information from every corner of linguistic study. They do claim, and rightly so, that the fact that languages have evolved among human populations is not evidence in favor of biological evolution.
It is true that the evolution of languages is much more Lamarckian than Darwinian. The inheritance of acquired characteristics is a hallmark of language evolution, in which terminology is routinely copied from neighboring populations. However, the process of empirical inquiry involved in the study of linguistic evolution is remarkably similar to the mode of inquiry involved in the study of biological evolution.
We don’t witness languages evolving. Our certainty about the process of linguistic change is based on the study of artifacts. Ancient documents are the lingusitic fossils that help us determine the extent of change in a language. The vocabulary and verbal forms used in the text can be compared to modern forms to gauge the degree to which the contemporary form has been influenced by other languages. Similarities in structure can be used to group the language within a historical or geographical context.
It is this process of inquiry that convinced linguists that certain languages of the Indian subcontinent were actually related to European languages. Thus the notion that there is a common ancestor for all Indo-European languages was established. Anyone claiming that proto-Indo-European (PIE) is a fiction concocted by linguists’ wishful thinking has to contend with as much significant empirical evidential support as there is for the existence of a common ancestor that we and all other modern primates share.
Linguists have been able to reconstruct the path through which an old Germanic language acquired Romance language adaptations and eventually gave birth to contemporary English. Similarly, a Romance language that acquired Slavic adaptations eventually became Romanian. In the same way, paleontologists and biologists have persuasively constructed the lineage of sea mammals, through which successive species of land mammals acquired aquatic adaptations.
We are hard pressed to determine exactly when a dialect of a language has acquired enough ‘mutations’ (through borrowings from other languages or the effects of regional isolation) to be considered a language in its own right. The evolution of languages is a matter of degree, in the same way as the relatedness of two species depends on their degree of divergence from their last common ancestor. The difficulty in determining when two subpopulations of the same biological species can be considered different species is just what we expect from the process of Darwinian evolution.
The lack of controversy surrounding linguistic evolution won’t convince a creationist that biological evolution is a closed case. However, he should realize that the methods employed by biologists in determining relationships among species of living and extinct organisms are the same as the methods that linguists have used to establish similar relationships among ancient and contemporary languages. We need to decide for ourselves whether these methods are just as effective, and their conclusions just as valid, when applied to biological artifacts as when applied to linguistic ones.
------------------
The dark nursery of evolution is very dark indeed.
Brad McFall
™ Version 4.2