The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

for ascertaining a specific time of inception but are instead identified post factum (Mufwene
2008: 11-28). It is also an approach that has prompted interest in manuscript studies, where
the application of phylogenetic principles is currently being tested on tracing textual
relationships (Spencer, Davidson & Barbrook 2004). If a language is treated as a species, an
idiolect is similarly treated as an individual organism. From this perspective, the theories of
language change draw heavily on the theories of evolutionary biology, especially the
principle of survival of the fittest, implying that a language changes for competitive reasons
and in order to suit better the condition of its speakers.
In many ways, the principle of ecological linguistics works well. However, in other
ways the comparison to biological evolution is a misguided one. Evolutionary biology posits
that changes to an organism are elicited out changes in environment, such as climatic changes
or a constant „survival of the fittest‟, and some languages certainly change as the direct result
of a changing environment: linguistic borrowings, neologisms and semantic extensions would
be good examples of this. Nevertheless, a language also changes for far less pressing
reasons. A child will not speak exactly the same language as their parent, often for little
more reason than to purposefully differentiate themselves. Thus, colloquialisms and slang
come and go in the spoken language, and although the slang of generation X will be
understood by generation Y, it might seem outmoded and a signal of a previous generation‟s
identity. In this way, language is constantly changing and not necessarily for reasons of
survival.
A further problem is that organisms presumably evolve to become better, hence the
Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest. Modern linguistics, however, teaches that all
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