Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The linguistic
niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial …

This paper draws on research in geography, linguistics, and political science to explain the
incidence of language regions and their effect on regional authority. It conjectures a chain of …

During the last three decades, scientists in formal and natural sciences have been
proposing models of language competition. Such models could prove instrumental in …

A growing number of studies seek to identify predictors of broad-scale patterns in human
cultural diversity, but three sources of non-independence in human cultural variables can …

Spicier food in hot countries has been explained in terms of natural selection on human
cultures, with spices with antimicrobial effects considered to be an adaptation to increased …

Languages vary in how they signal “who does what to whom”. Three main strategies to
indicate the participant roles of “who” and “whom” are case, verbal indexing, and rigid word …

The world is facing a crisis of language loss that rivals, or exceeds, the rate of loss of
biodiversity. There is an increasing urgency to understand the drivers of language change in …

What role does speaker population size play in shaping rates of language evolution? There
has been little consensus on the expected relationship between rates and patterns of …

This contribution theorizes the historical dynamics of so-called language isolates, languages
which cannot be demonstrated to belong to any known language family. On the basis of a …

Language diversity is under threat, with between a third to a half of all languages considered
endangered, and predicted rates of loss equivalent to one language per month for the rest of …