10-09-03 07:36, Michael J Smith wrote:
> Would you say that the evolution of languages, but obviously not the
> number of them, involves exponential growth along with and intertwined
> with the exponential growth of society, so that languages have been
> increasingly evolving at a progressive rate?
There is no simple formula for the rate of change -- that's for sure.
Change is driven by lots of factors, both purely linguistic and
extralinguistic, and I believe its tempo is generally chaotic (rather
than simply non-uniform). As for social and demographic factors, you
might think that large societies provide more room for diversity and so
populational growth should accelerate linguistic change. However, you
can't ignore the tendency towards linguistic consolidation (not to say
Gleichschaltung) in centrally organised societies, often openly promoted
by their institutions (the bureaucracy, school system, mass media,
publishers, etc.). The very existence of an official standard and of a
literary tradition is a strong factor of selection, making non-standard
dialects lose their unique features and so reducing diversity. Once upon
a time it was quite impossible for, say, ten million people to speak in
the same way. Today, speech communities of that size are by no means
unusual.
Piotr