Publisher's Synopsis
When and how did language originate in the human species, how did early populations and their languages spread and diversify, and why have so many of the world's languages become endangered and extinct? The Life Cycle of Languages will draw a series of analogies from evolutionary and population biology to look at language and languages through the full circle from "birth" to "death" and back again. For each stage in the language "life cycle", a different set of analogies will be adopted in order to explore each type of phenomenon.
Interest in the areas of language evolution/origins and language endangerment have grown exponentially in the past few years. Both are much-discussed topics in the popular media, and several popular books have been published recently, including Robin Dunbar's Gossip, Grooming and the Evolution of Language; Terry Deacon's Symbolic Species; David Crystal's Language Death; and Daniel Nettle & Suzanne Romaine's Vanishing Voices. Broadly speaking, those interested in language evolution and origins tend to take a biological approach, while those interested in how languages become endangered and extinct (and revitalised) tend to focus on social and political issues. However, there have been few if any attempts to approach these issues in a unified way using an interdisciplinary approach. The Life Cycle of Languages aims to draw together these different strands of research to look at language origins, diversity, endangerment and revitalisation in a lively and accessible style. Evidence will be brought in from a wide range of disciplines, including evolutionary biology, ecology, cognitive neuroscience, computational modelling, history, archaeology, and of course linguistics. The issues addressed in The Life Cycle of Languages will be wide in scope, but each section will include specific and pertinent examples. A central argument will develop in favour of the usefulness of species and meme analogies in understanding language origins, diversity and extinction.
