The Dynamics of Norm Change in the Cultural Evolution of Language

Abstract

What happens when a new social convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change - such as institutions or committed activists - have been identified since a long time, little is known about how a population adopts a new convention, due to the difficulties of finding representative data. Here we address this issue by looking at changes occurred to 2,541 orthographic and lexical norms in English and Spanish through the analysis of a large corpora of books published between the years 1800 and 2008. We detect three markedly distinct patterns in the data, depending on whether the behavioral change results from the action of a formal institution, an informal authority or a spontaneous process of unregulated evolution. We propose a simple evolutionary model able to capture all the observed behaviors and we show that it reproduces quantitatively the empirical data. This work identifies general mechanisms of norm change and we anticipate that it will be of interest to researchers investigating the cultural evolution of language and, more broadly, human collective behavior.

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• Coevolutionary Dynamics of Actions and Opinions in Social Networks
• Shaping New Norms for AI
• Challenges in detecting evolutionary forces in language change using diachronic corpora
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• Modeling competitive evolution of multiple languages
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• Data-informed modeling of the formation, persistence, and evolution of social norms and conventions
• Fading of collective attention shapes the evolution of linguistic variants
• A minor extension of the logistic equation for growth of word counts on online media: Parametric description of diversity of growth phenomena in society
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• Oscillatory dynamics between language usage and economic activity