Language evolution for long-lived people

[ukfl]

Assuming a group of people who live significantly longer than the average human (say, several hundred years at least), would the language spoken by that group evolve comparatively slower or at the same rate?

[eldin raigmore]

All else being equal, I’d guess “slower”.
It could depend on how extensive and frequent their contacts with speakers of other languages were, among other possibilities.
What are your own thoughts?

[Znex]

Well to start with, it has been observed even in long-lived individuals in real life that their speech has changed markedly over the course of their life. For instance we have had opportunity to examine the Queen of England's speech over time due to her personal popularity and the popularity of her speech as a standard English (the Received Pronunciation variety) and notably several phonetic features, such as raised nasal /æ/, horse-hoarse distinction, tense final /ɪ/, and backed /ʌ/, have all changed over the course of the century. Grammatical change has been less easy to follow, but presumably they would change as subtly as they have and do, except that standardisation would likely have effect on the extent of the change.

It should also be considered how much cross-linguistic contact has been had; multilingual speakers will likely incorporate parts of foreign speech and vice versa into their daily language, whereas, understandably, more isolated communities will be less influenced by outside contact.

Whether the culture itself is conservative or innovative is another question to consider; more innovation requires new language to talk about the innovated, where conservatism may rely more on traditional poems and songs for instance, that by their very constructed nature are unlikely to change compared to fluid spoken language.

[eldin raigmore]

Yeah!
What Znex said!

Among humans each generation of L1-acquirers “tunes their linguistic antennae” mostly toward their own age-mates, rather than those older or younger — even though at first most people who speak to them are their elders.

(Consider how frequently the older children in a family can translate between their parents and their youngest siblings — and their parents and younger sibs must rely on them to do so!)

Then as time moves on the generations find they must exert effort to continue to be mutually intelligible.
(Experience shows that, objectively, the older generation has more success understanding the younger, than vice-versa; but success is partial in both directions: Neither completely fails and neither fully succeeds. —— Subjectively, it can seem very different from the objective results.)

If young people find it necessary, or even merely advantageous, to communicate with their elders, they’ll still stay able to understand and speak some older lexemes etc. Similarly, if older people find it advantageous to communicate with their youngers, they’ll learn to understand and speak some newer locutions.

As young people grow more influential and more numerous, their ways of talking will become predominant, and older ways will recede in frequency. (Is my guess!)

But as long as the elders are still alive, their speech-habits won’t completely exit the colloquial vernacular; not until they die. (Again, I’m guessing!)

———

What do you, or anyone else, think about those guesses?

[k1234567890y]

Tolkien's elves are immortal if they are not killed, but nonetheless their language still evolve...I don't know how realistic this is though

I have heard something about Znex's example of the Queen's speech before though, but he has provided some more details here.

[Khemehekis]

Another case in fiction is the struldbrugs from Gulliver's Travels:

https://www.shmoop.com/gullivers-travel ... brugs.html

Language changes all the time. So, struldbrugs over the age of 200 generally can't understand the words of the younger generation, or even of younger struldbrugs.

[Scytheria]

Interesting.... back in the day I did table-top role-playing games, and we envisaged immortal creatures who passed through the centuries, and moved from place to place (usually as a result of being hounded out), assimilating language and culture as they went. Despite being immortal, their memories were finite, and they found that they could seldom understand the written language of their ancestors or even their own language if they found their own writings from centuries past. To solve the problem they created a totally rigid, inflexible artificial language (!) to solve their 'degeneration' problem and became fanatical about it, refusing to write or speak in anything else.

[Salmoneus]

Scytheria: doesn't matter - the 'inflexible' language will still change! After all, if nobody remember the language of 200 years ago, nobody knows that their language has changed over the last 200 years...


OP: there's no way to tell.

Languages change for, let's say, three reasons: acquisition failure; dissimilation; and assimilation.

Acquisition failure - where children fail to learn a rule from their parents - will happen much less often if birth rates are lower, which presumably they are if lifespans are longer and the population is stable (but of course, that doesn't apply if the population is booming - loss of a major predator, for instance?). And indeed, if lifespans are longer, people live longer in contact with older generations, so they're more able to 'correct' their language over time. However, it's not clear that this is really that important as a source of language change. Acquisition failure has iirc been implicated in the loss of some subtle contrasts and complex sounds - /T/, for instance, is mastered relatively late, and that may be partly why it's being lost independently in so many dialects. It can also presumably result in the loss of some grammatical complexities - a rapidly occurring one in English at the moment seems to be the use of "fewer" with count nouns (when I were a lad, lots of people didn't say "fewer", but more authoritative sources (teachers, newspapers, politicians, etc) still had it; now it seems to be virtually extinct). The loss of -ly adverbs may be another example. But most language change isn't easily explained this way.

Instead, language changes usually begin as intentional dissimilation: a group of people choose to talk differently to distinguish themselves from outsiders. This may be as subtle as a 'sexier' articulation of vowels, or as dramatic as massive lexical replacement.

Assimilation then spreads those changes: people is less prestigious groups emulate the language of prestigious groups.


To seriously impact language change, then, your people would have to either reduce the presence of dissimilation (everyone speaks the same) or reduce the presence of assimilation (small groups have their own argots, but the changes don't spread to the whole population or to the next generation). None of this is directly affected by lifespan.

Now, it's easy to imagine, say, a society in which longer lifespan means more powerful elders, and so greater pressure to conform to their speech pattern. After all, if you're, say, 25 and starting in a job, you don't want to completely piss off your boss, but at some level you know that you're on a moving ladder and eventually the old guys are going to make way for you and your generation. But if you know you're likely to spend the next 200 years in middle-management (if you don't get sacked first), maybe there's more incentive to suck up to your boss, including trying harder to appease his grouchy dislike of the word "innit". So maybe a long-living species may indeed reward conservativism.

Actually, a potentially big point here: if the birthrate is low, people have fewer people their age to develop their language with, so will be more dependent on older people, which could certainly encourage conservativism. And there must be a good deal of pressure to be able to speak a common dialect, even if you have your own 'youth' register as well, just to be able to talk to old people.


On the other hand, maybe the opposite is true. Maybe each generation is so stymied by the one above that they seek cultural independence, and each generation develops its own dialect - which would weaken the effects of assimilation. Just consider: today, dialect surveys often distinguish 'older' and 'younger' speakers in the same region. The point being, the dialect of the former rapidly makes way for that of the latter. But if people live longer then a) there may be more than two age-based forms of the dialect, and b) it's less clear at any moment what the 'standard' dialect is. Is it what the 40-year-old speaks, or what the 80-year-old speaks? Or what the 120-year-old speaks? Again, if everyone's working together they need to find some lingua franca - but what if they're not? Maybe age cohorts (having reached adulthood) live almost independently of one another? [there could be literal wars between cities of different age groups...] "well screw you dad, and your dinosaur traditions, me and my friends are going to go build our own society!" - must be more attractive if you've got longer to wait before inheriting your parents' things...

And what about old people? Are they always conservative? For us, old people are in power, until they're not and it's too late. For a long-lived race, generations may have to power-share, so maybe older generations want to distinguish themselves from younger, callower groups? It's easy to imagine that a society may regard increasingly 'sophisticated' language as an indicator of maturity - so maybe the elderly are the ones making up slang and coded grammar to distinguish themselves from the young imposters? [happens in real life: secret society code languages]. In which case, language change could actually happen more quickly!

[Creyeditor]

@Scytheria: I really the first part of that idea. Not being able to understand your own written language.

---

Spoiler:

Scytheria: doesn't matter - the 'inflexible' language will still change! After all, if nobody remember the language of 200 years ago, nobody knows that their language has changed over the last 200 years...


OP: there's no way to tell.

Languages change for, let's say, three reasons: acquisition failure; dissimilation; and assimilation.

Acquisition failure - where children fail to learn a rule from their parents - will happen much less often if birth rates are lower, which presumably they are if lifespans are longer and the population is stable (but of course, that doesn't apply if the population is booming - loss of a major predator, for instance?). And indeed, if lifespans are longer, people live longer in contact with older generations, so they're more able to 'correct' their language over time. However, it's not clear that this is really that important as a source of language change. Acquisition failure has iirc been implicated in the loss of some subtle contrasts and complex sounds - /T/, for instance, is mastered relatively late, and that may be partly why it's being lost independently in so many dialects. It can also presumably result in the loss of some grammatical complexities - a rapidly occurring one in English at the moment seems to be the use of "fewer" with count nouns (when I were a lad, lots of people didn't say "fewer", but more authoritative sources (teachers, newspapers, politicians, etc) still had it; now it seems to be virtually extinct). The loss of -ly adverbs may be another example. But most language change isn't easily explained this way.

Instead, language changes usually begin as intentional dissimilation: a group of people choose to talk differently to distinguish themselves from outsiders. This may be as subtle as a 'sexier' articulation of vowels, or as dramatic as massive lexical replacement.

Assimilation then spreads those changes: people is less prestigious groups emulate the language of prestigious groups.


To seriously impact language change, then, your people would have to either reduce the presence of dissimilation (everyone speaks the same) or reduce the presence of assimilation (small groups have their own argots, but the changes don't spread to the whole population or to the next generation). None of this is directly affected by lifespan.

Now, it's easy to imagine, say, a society in which longer lifespan means more powerful elders, and so greater pressure to conform to their speech pattern. After all, if you're, say, 25 and starting in a job, you don't want to completely piss off your boss, but at some level you know that you're on a moving ladder and eventually the old guys are going to make way for you and your generation. But if you know you're likely to spend the next 200 years in middle-management (if you don't get sacked first), maybe there's more incentive to suck up to your boss, including trying harder to appease his grouchy dislike of the word "innit". So maybe a long-living species may indeed reward conservativism.

Actually, a potentially big point here: if the birthrate is low, people have fewer people their age to develop their language with, so will be more dependent on older people, which could certainly encourage conservativism. And there must be a good deal of pressure to be able to speak a common dialect, even if you have your own 'youth' register as well, just to be able to talk to old people.


On the other hand, maybe the opposite is true. Maybe each generation is so stymied by the one above that they seek cultural independence, and each generation develops its own dialect - which would weaken the effects of assimilation. Just consider: today, dialect surveys often distinguish 'older' and 'younger' speakers in the same region. The point being, the dialect of the former rapidly makes way for that of the latter. But if people live longer then a) there may be more than two age-based forms of the dialect, and b) it's less clear at any moment what the 'standard' dialect is. Is it what the 40-year-old speaks, or what the 80-year-old speaks? Or what the 120-year-old speaks? Again, if everyone's working together they need to find some lingua franca - but what if they're not? Maybe age cohorts (having reached adulthood) live almost independently of one another? [there could be literal wars between cities of different age groups...] "well screw you dad, and your dinosaur traditions, me and my friends are going to go build our own society!" - must be more attractive if you've got longer to wait before inheriting your parents' things...

And what about old people? Are they always conservative? For us, old people are in power, until they're not and it's too late. For a long-lived race, generations may have to power-share, so maybe older generations want to distinguish themselves from younger, callower groups? It's easy to imagine that a society may regard increasingly 'sophisticated' language as an indicator of maturity - so maybe the elderly are the ones making up slang and coded grammar to distinguish themselves from the young imposters? [happens in real life: secret society code languages]. In which case, language change could actually happen more quickly!

Another important point might be the time they need to acquire the language, something like youth or childhood. I recently lead a scientific paper on iterated learning that said the shorter the time you learn (i.e. the lesser the number of sentences you hear) the faster a language will change, because learner tend to overgeneralize more (i.e. make generalizations even though they do not have enough data). If the youth is considerably longer, this might slow down language change a bit.

[ukfl]

Thank you everyone for your responses. I apologize for not posting before now; I'm just now able to get back to the boards. The information provided presents a lot to consider. I appreciate the different perspectives that present interesting story telling directions. I think given the strong religious (near cult-like) social structure I'm going with, the idea of regulated language compared with an illicit secret language provides the most interesting of those.