Spatial evidence that language change is not neutral

James Burridge, Tamsin Blaxter

Published 2020-05-15Version 1

The neutral theory of genetic and linguistic evolution holds that the relative frequencies of variants evolve by random drift. Neutral evolution remains a plausible null model of language change. In this paper we provide evidence against the neutral hypothesis by considering the geographical patterns observed in language surveys. We model speakers as neurons in a Hopfield network embedded in space, analogous to one of the classical two dimensional lattice models of statistical physics. The universality class of the model depends on the form of the activation function of the neurons, which encodes learning behaviour of speakers. We view maps generated by the Survey of English Dialects as samples from our network. Maximum likelihood analysis, and comparison of spatial auto-correlations between real and simulated maps, indicates that the maps are more likely to belong to the conformity-driven Ising class, where interfaces are driven by surface tension, rather than the neutral Voter class, where they are driven by noise.