ABSTRACT
Language study since at least the eighteenth century recognized the phylogenetic relations of some languages (e.g. that English and Scandinavian languages came from a common ancestor, which shared a lineage with Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and others), and in this it differed from natural history, which tended to view categories as either part of some cosmic teleology or as strictly logically governed. With the Darwinian revolution and the subsequent emphasis on adaptation, natural selection, and transmission of genetic elements, language study found new food for thought, particularly for explaining why certain types of language change happened and persisted. This chapter briefly discusses this history and then moves on to focus on its implications for contemporary linguistics, mainly the extent to which biological analogies can inform language evolution and language extinction. It argues that the biological analogy has been useful for thinking about the advent of particular changes and the way they diffuse through population groups both diachronically and synchronically, and that it has currency in thinking about language extinction as the termination of specific language phylogenies. However, there are shortcomings to this, and it requires thinking about the biological analogy along different axes – sometimes as virus or parasite, sometimes as genetics.
