Languages are often compared to living species because of the way in which they diverge into new tongues over time in an ever-growing linguistic tree. Some critics have claimed that this comparison is a superficial one, a nice metaphor but nothing more.
But the new study by Quentin Atkinson, now at the University of Oxford, suggests that languages evolve at a similar stop-and-start pace, which uncannily echoes a long-standing theory in biology, known as ‘punctuated equilibrium’. The theory’s followers claim that life on Earth also evolved at an uneven pace, full of rapid bursts and slow periods.
Famously championed by the late Stephen Jay Gould, the punctuated equilibrium theory suggests that most species change very little over time and big evolutionary changes are concentrated at rare moments where new species branch off from existing lineages. Together with colleagues from the US and New Zealand, Atkinson found similar patterns in three of the worlds’ largest families of languages.