Languageʹs place in nature

Human language has enabled our species to exchange information and to formulate ideas; understanding how human linguistic faculties evolved is one of the great challenges in evolutionary theory. Studies of the evolution of human language can be broadly separated into two types of approaches: those that consider the (e.g. phylogenetic) relationships between existing languages and their common ancestors; and those that try to understand the evolution of the human language capacity itself. For the latter case, Martin Nowak and co-workers have now shown that evolutionary game theory provides a framework in which the evolution of linguistic elements, such as word formation and syntax, can be investigated. These recent studies show that natural selection will favour the evolution of such ‘human’ linguistic elements from simple animal communication if they enable more reliable exchange of relevant, that is fitness-enhancing, information.