Language Evolution

Salikoko S. Mufwene is the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics as well as Professor on the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago, USA.

'Inspired by evolutionary biology, Salikoko Mufwene's spectacularly comprehensive and thought-provoking new book goes for the big picture and illuminates fundamental principles of language evolution and language contact. Showcasing the peculiar (or not so peculiar, after all) evolutionary conditions of creoles, Mufwene reaches novel and unorthodox insights which build upon concepts such as the importance of ecology, competition and selection, imperfect replication, and family resemblance. He questions and retunes some fundamental notions in linguistics like "system", "transmission" or "acquisition", thus coming considerably closer to an understanding of how language has evolved than earlier linguistic theory. Ingenious imagery like the highway traffic analogy show how patterns have emerged through "invisible hand" evolution, the convergence of communal behavior, and how imperfection, far from being imperfect, generates real-life structures. Principles like the ubiquity of contact and hybridism, the understanding of languages as species and complex adaptive systems, the relationship between mutual accommodation between individuals and emergent communal behavior, or the link between globalization and indigenization invoke a new down-to-earth linguistics in which the interactions of real-life individuals are at the core of far-reaching developments. A must-read for theorists of language change and language contact, and for anybody interested in how language really works.' Professor Edgar W. Schneider, Chair of English Linguistics, University of Regensburg, Germany

• 1. Introduction I: Population Dynamics and Language Evolution 2. Language evolution: The population genetics way3. Population movements, contacts, competition, selection, and language evolution 4. How population-wide patterns emerge in language evolution: A comparison with highway traffic5. What do creoles and pidgins tell us about the evolution of language? 6. Race, racialism, and the study of language evolution in America II: Competition, Selection, And the Development of Creoles 7. Competition and selection in language evolution 8. Transfer and the substrate hypothesis in creolistics 9. Grammaticization and the development of creoles 10. Multilingualism in linguistic history III: Globalization And Language Vitality 11. Language birth and death 12. Globalization and the myth of killer languages: What's really going on?13. Myths of globalization: What African demolinguistics reveals 14. A Case Study: The ecology of Gullah's survival Conclusions Bibliography Index