#48, News: Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure
By Tarun Patel
ScienceDaily (Jan. 21, 2010) — Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Memphis have released a new study on linguistic evolution that challenges the prominent hypothesis for why languages differ throughout the world.
The study argues that human languages may adapt more like biological organisms than previously thought and that the more common and popular the language, the simpler its construction to facilitate its survival.
Traditional thinking is that languages develop based upon random change and historical drift. For example, English and Turkish are very different languages based upon histories that separate them in space and time. For years, it has been the reigning assumption in the linguistic sciences.
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January 23rd, 2010About... Tarun Patel
This author published 569 posts in this site.Tarun Patel (http://tarunpatel.net/blog/) is an ELT and Communication skills teacher, working with Charotar University of Science & Technology (CHARUSAT - http://charusat.ac.in/). He has been dealing with the Language learning processes for last seven years. 'Technology in Teaching English' is his favorite domain and he has presented several research papers in national and international conferences on the same theme. He is the founder editor of ELTWeekly (http://eltweekly.com/), India's first weekly ELT eNewsletter which reaches in more than forty countries and benefits more than 1600d teachers of English and Communication Skills. Have a look at his personal blog http://tarunpatel.net/blog/.
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