Prof. William S-Y. WANG, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

New challenges for evolutionary linguistics. The 13th International Conference in Evolutionary Linguistics (CIEL-13). Shandong University, Jinan, China (online), 4-5 June 2022.

Abstract
Major advances in genetics and neuroscience have been made in recent times that offer new opportunities for evolutionary linguistics. Darwin stressed the parallels in the development of languages and peoples. A century later, Cavalli-Sforza compared family trees of languages and peoples of the world side by side, based on modern populations. By now, research on Ancient DNA is growing at an explosive rate. Knowing how populations were formed through the millennia clearly sheds light on how languages were distributed during ancient times. Genetics contributed to linguistics in finding genes which underlie our language-ready brain. Progress in exploring the brain has now gone much deeper beyond the cerebral cortex, into subcortical structures and the brain stem, and recently into the cerebellum, which has the greatest concentration of neurons in our brain. We must study the evolution of language in this new light, integrating these advances into our efforts, raising new questions regarding speciation: hybridization in languages and introgression in organisms, as well as new questions on how language emerged and is served in the brain as a total embedded system.