Adaptive Communication: Languages with More Non-Native Speakers Tend to Have Fewer Word Forms

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Evolutionary Biology
• Sociolinguistics

Background:

• Explaining global language diversity is a key goal in linguistics.
• Language contact, specifically the number of non-native speakers, is examined for its evolutionary impact.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effect of language contact on language change and evolution.
• To determine if non-native speaker influence impacts information encoding strategies.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of hundreds of languages across families, regions, and text types.
• Three statistical analyses were employed to assess the relationship between language contact and lexical diversity.

Main Results:

• Languages with higher contact levels exhibit reduced lexical diversity, using fewer word forms for equivalent information.
• Statistical analyses indicate non-native speakers partially explain this variance in information encoding.

Conclusions:

• Language is an information encoding system shaped by speaker needs.
• Language evolution should be modeled as a co-evolutionary process involving societal structures, learning capabilities, and linguistic structures.