The dynamics of norm change in the cultural evolution of language
Open accessAbstract
Significance: Social conventions, such as shaking hands or dressing formally, allow us to coordinate smoothly and, once established, appear to be natural. But what happens when a new convention replaces an old one? This question has remained largely unanswered so far, due to the lack of suitable data. Here, we investigate the process of norm change by looking at 2,541 linguistic norm shifts occurring over the last two centuries in English and Spanish. We identify different patterns of norm adoption depending on whether the change is spontaneous or driven by a centralized institution, and we propose a simple model that reproduces all of the empirical observations. These results shed light on the cultural evolution of linguistic norms and human collective behavior.
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Other studies indicate minorities as small as 0.3% can trigger substantial linguistic and social changes.
“However, real-world observations reveal a wider range, with some studies proposing 30 to 40% for gender conventions in corporate leadership (25, 48), and others indicating that minorities as small as 0.3% can trigger substantial linguistic and social changes (29, 49–51).”
From Emergent social conventions and collective bias in LLM populations (2025) · cites this paper as [51]
The Model and Unregulated evolution sections link small groups of committed users to the success of new linguistic forms. But the 0.3% figure (c = 0.003) appears in Intervention of informal institutions as a fitted commitment parameter supporting the old British spelling, not as a minority shown to trigger change; the paper also does not establish that figure for social changes generally. Page numbers are unavailable in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.88)
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Self-citation
- Authors
- Amato, R., Lacasa, L., Díaz-Guilera, A., & Baronchelli, A.
- Affiliations
- Universitat de Barcelona (ES)
- Queen Mary University of London (GB)
- Departament de Física de la Matèria Condensada, Universitat de Barcelona, E-08028 Barcelona, Spain;
- City, University of London (GB)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2018-08-02
- Volume
- 115
- Issue
- 33
- Pages
- 8260-8265
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC6099908
- OpenAlex
- W2885347281
- Cited by
- 62
- References
- 65
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 34.34
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- City Research Online (City University London) (acceptedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Queen Mary Research Online (Queen Mary University of London) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (FIS2012-38266-C02-02, FIS2015-71582-C2-2-P)
- Generalitat de Catalunya (2014SGR608)
- RCUK | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/P01660X/1)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Evolution and Genetic Dynamics
- Keywords
- norm change, cultural evolution of language, spelling rules, lexical norms, English language, Spanish language, language change, formal institutions, informal authority, evolutionary models, collective behavior, historical corpora
- MeSH terms
- Cultural Evolution, Humans, Language, Social Norms
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