What African Linguistics Can Contribute to Evolutionary Linguistics

Inspired by evolutionary biology, the term evolutionary linguistics has been used recently by linguists such as Croft (2008), McMahon & McMahon (2013), and myself (Mufwene 2013a, 2013b) to characterize the kind of research being done today on language evolution that focuses not only on the phylogenetic emergence of language but also, or alternatively, on language speciation and the emergence of linguistic diversity, on the actuation of change, or on language vitality and loss. The alternative term language evolution is as ambiguous as biological evolution, because it applies to both the subject matter and the research area itself, though it is often interpreted quite specifically as the evolution of language, in reference only to the phylogenetic emergence of language(s). However, since Darwin’s (1859) On the origins of species, evolutionary biologists too have been as much concerned with speciation and the emergence of new species as with how changing ecological conditions affect extant species and thus with the endangerment and loss of some, although questions of vitality have become the central preoccupation of macroecology. Selectively seeking inspiration from evolutionary biology, self-proclaimed evolutionary linguists have been interested in how findings in biology-based paleontology (and indeed also in various other research areas characterized as paleo-, such as paleo-neurology) can inform our speculations about how and when the earliest ancestor(s) of modern languages must have emerged in mankind. Their research questions have included the following among others: What particular kind of architectures may the primordial language(s) have had? How different were those systems from those of modern languages, notwithstanding the various ways they now vary typologically? How did they evolve into modern complex systems, under what particular ecological pressures? Was the transition from the presumably simpler architecture of the primordial linguistic communication to modern language(s) incremental or saltatory (in a kind of catastrophic way, as claimed by Bickerton 1990, 2010)? One way or another, how does the “language organ” or Universal Grammar fit in this evolutionary scenario?