Taking the "Temperature" of Languages

Ricardo Bermudez-Otero and Tobias Galla discuss the mathematics
describing the evolution of human languages. The sounds and
structures of the world's approximately 7,000 languages never stop
changing. Just compare the English in Romeo and Juliet or the
Spanish in Don Quixote to the modern forms. But historical records
give an incomplete view of language evolution. Increasingly,
linguists draw upon mathematical models to figure out which
features of a language change often and which ones change more
rarely over the course of thousands of years. A new model inspired
by physics assigns a "temperature" to many sounds and grammatical
structures. Features with higher temperatures are less stable, so
they change more often as time goes on. The linguistic thermometer
will help researchers reconstruct how our languages came to be, and
how they might change in future generations.