LANGUAGES evolve in fits and starts rather than gradually, an analysis of the Bantu, Indo-European and Austronesian families of languages reveals.
Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, UK, and colleagues constructed an evolutionary tree for each of these language families. The “length” of each branch back to the root of the tree records how different a descendant language is from its ancestral root, in terms of how many words were replaced.
The team found that in each language family there was significantly more lexical change along branches in which more new languages had emerged, suggesting periods of abrupt evolution…
