Competition and Cooperation in Language Evolution: A Comparison Between Communication of Apes and Humans

The article considers the current state of the Russian language. Information technologies in the twenty first century present diverse forms of linguistic knowledge and modalities of knowledge quantisation in a linguistic sign. The Russian language develops from a standard, direct expression of thoughts to a nonstandard, psychologically complex, associative deep statement of thoughts. In the early nineteenth century, during the democratisation of the Russian language, a national genius, Alexander Pushkin, emerged. Thanks to him, the unique informational, cultural, and artistic evolution of the language took place. Nowadays, while democratisation and globalisation, processes which resemble the language evolution 200 years ago, are occurring. These processes suggest some patterns: overcoming stylistic disparity, changes in linguistic sign boundaries and semantic extension.

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Clash of signs: Putting bilingualism back into language evolution

10.31234/osf.io/5uebp ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Steven Samuel

Keyword(s):

Language Evolution ◽

Modern Human ◽

Alarm Calls ◽

Bilingual Children ◽

Human Language ◽

Typically Developing ◽

Typically Developing Children ◽

Modern Humans ◽

The Real ◽

Multiple Languages

Research and thinking into the cognitive aspects of language evolution has usually attempted to account for how the capacity for learning even one modern human language developed. Bilingualism has perhaps been thought of as something to think about only once the ‘real’ puzzle of monolingualism is solved, but this would assume in turn (and without evidence) that bilingualism evolved after monolingualism. All typically-developing children (and adults) are capable of learning multiple languages, and the majority of modern humans are at least bilingual. In this paper I ask whether by skipping bilingualism out of language evolution we have missed a trick. I propose that exposure to synonymous signs, such as food and alarm calls, are a necessary precondition for the abstracting away of sound from referent. In support of this possibility is evidence that modern day bilingual children are better at breaking this ‘word magic’ spell. More generally, language evolution should be viewed through the lens of bilingualism, as this is the end state we are attempting to explain.

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