The Impact of Society and Culture on Language

This chapter begins by looking at the effect that society and its social structures would have had on emerging language, especially regarding the need to hunt, keep peace and raise offspring. It then turns to the cultural evolution of language and the notion that language is self-evolving as it is transmitted across the community via social interaction. It explores the possibility that not only genes affect language but, vice versa, language affects genes in a complex interation between biology and culture. The chapter finishes with Kirby's loop of three adaptive systems involved in the emergence of language.