Historical linguist claims that language controls the speakers: Darwinism in linguistics

Historical linguist Nikolaus Ritt from the Department of English and American Studies at Universitat Wien (Austria) claims that it may actually be language which controls us, the speakers, rather than the other way round. Applying a generalised Darwinian framework to linguistics, he is particularly interested in how words and sounds change over time and how they use humans for the “selfish” purpose of getting themselves replicated.

Nikolaus Ritt examines language change from an unconventional point of view. Contrary to established, speaker-centred theories of language change his generalised Darwinian approach does not reduce the properties of human behaviour to the intentions and goals of free-willed human agents.

As opposed to hermeneutic theories of historical linguistics, the generalised Darwinian approach is radically analytic and regards cultural and linguistic change as something that happens with speakers’ selves being only partly involved in the process, and experiencing it rather than driving it.

“The crucial point of this Darwinian approach”, says Nikolaus Ritt, “is that speakers play no central role in our explanation of this directed evolution. Of course humans are the ones who speak, and they are the ones who acquire language, but the pattern of change that has come to unfold over the centuries results from the interaction of rhythm and sounds. From this perspective, speakers only provide the machinery which ’selfish’ sounds use to replicate themselves, but they do not actively steer this evolutionary process.”