Evolutionary Linguistics

Evolutionary linguistics studies the origins and evolution of human language using a broad variety of approaches and methods from multiple different disciplines. This chapter reviews current approaches to the origins and evolution of language, and gives an overview of methods that have been developed to investigate how language has evolved from non-human communication systems, and how it has developed over time. In particular, we take into account comparative studies with animal communication systems, anthropological and paleontological evidence, as well as experimental, corpus-based, and computational modeling approaches.(This is an extended preprint of our contribution to the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd edition.)