Historical Linguist Claims Language Controls Its Speakers: Darwinism in Linguistics
Most people assume they own their language. They pick the words, they set the tone, they decide when a phrase has had its day. Nikolaus Ritt, a historical linguist at the Department of English and American Studies at Universitat Wien in Austria, argues that the arrangement runs the other way. It may actually be language which controls us, the speakers, rather than the other way round.
Ritt applies 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. In that picture, a sound pattern is less like a tool a speaker wields and more like an organism that survives because it copies well.
Taking the speaker out of the story
This is a deliberate provocation aimed at the mainstream. Established theories of language change are speaker-centred. They explain shifts in pronunciation or grammar by pointing to what people wanted: prestige, clarity, group identity, ease of articulation. Ritt's 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, which read change as meaningful human action, the approach is radically analytic. It treats cultural and linguistic change as something that happens with speakers' selves only partly involved, and experienced rather than driven.
Ritt puts it bluntly. "The crucial point of this Darwinian approach," he says, "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."
Where the idea comes from
The intellectual lineage is not hard to trace. Richard Dawkins argued in The Selfish Gene that a gene is best understood as a replicator using bodies to make copies of itself, and in the same book he floated the meme as a cultural equivalent. Philosophers and biologists later generalised the logic into universal Darwinism: wherever you find variation, selection and inheritance, you can expect evolution, whether the substrate is DNA, antibodies, software or speech.
Language fits the template surprisingly well. Variation is constant, because no two people pronounce a word identically. Inheritance is obvious, because children reconstruct a grammar from what they hear. Selection is the interesting part. Some variants get copied more often than others, and the ones that survive are not necessarily the ones that serve speakers best. They are the ones that are easy to produce, easy to hear and easy to remember.
What the evidence looks like
English supplies a famous test case. Between roughly 1400 and 1700 the long vowels of English shifted position in a chain, so that the vowel in "bite" no longer sounds anything like it did to Chaucer. The Great Vowel Shift was not announced, planned or voted on. No committee decided that "hus" should become "house". The shift unfolded across generations, and by the time it was visible in the written record it had already happened in millions of mouths.
That is precisely the pattern Ritt's model predicts. Speakers were not steering. They were the medium through which the change propagated. Rhythm played a role too: English has a strong preference for alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, and sounds that fit that rhythm tend to survive while awkward ones erode. Look at how "cupboard" lost its middle consonants, or how "going to" collapsed into "gonna". Nobody chose either outcome, and both are now stable.
The objections
The approach has critics, and they are not gentle. The core complaint is that "selfish sounds" is a metaphor doing the work of a mechanism. Genes have a physical substrate and a copying process that can be traced molecule by molecule. Sounds do not. When a phoneme "replicates", what is actually happening is that a child hears an adult and reproduces the sound approximately, which sounds a lot like ordinary language acquisition with unfamiliar vocabulary bolted on.
There is also the awkward fact that speakers demonstrably do steer some change. Deliberate coinages stick. Standardisation campaigns work. Political vocabulary gets engineered on purpose. Debates like this run constantly on forums such as r/linguistics, where the Darwinian camp and the speaker-centred camp trade the same arguments they trade in journals, just faster.
Why the argument matters beyond the seminar room
Ritt's position is not really a claim that humans are passive. It is a claim about where explanation belongs. If language evolution is driven by properties of the linguistic material itself, then studying speaker psychology will only ever get you halfway. You also need to study what makes a form copyable.
That has practical fallout. Anyone working with language across generations or borders, from lexicographers to translators to people studying what the bilingual brain does with two competing systems, ends up dealing with forms that behave as if they had momentum of their own. Anyone who has tried to stop a slang term from spreading, or to keep a technical term from drifting, has felt that momentum push back.
Whether sounds are truly selfish or merely behave that way, the observation stands: languages change in directions nobody voted for, and the speakers are usually the last to notice.