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Nature 449, 665-667 (11 October 2007) | doi:10.1038/449665a; Published online 10 October 2007

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Linguistics: An invisible hand

W. Tecumseh Fitch1

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Quantitative relationships between how frequently a word is used and how rapidly it changes over time raise intriguing questions about the way individual behaviours determine large-scale linguistic and cultural change.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, linguistics was considered a thoroughly historical science, focusing on how languages such as English or Sanskrit changed through time. By uncovering rules governing phonological change, historical linguists reconstructed dead protolanguages such as Indo-European — an ancestral dialect spoken some 10,000 years ago that diverged into a wide variety of modern languages, including Hindi, Russian, Spanish, English and Gaelic.

  1. W. Tecumseh Fitch is in the School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, Fife KY16 9JP, UK.
    Email: wtsf@st-andrews.ac.uk

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