Languages evolve, diversify and become extinct, so they count as biology, right? A recent paper modelling the rise and fall of language diversity gave me a welcome excuse to revisit languages from an evolutionary perspective:
How languages evolve and die
Current Biology Volume 36, Issue 17, 7 September 2026, Pages R925--R927
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The 7,500 languages known today represent only a fraction of the language diversity that existed as recently as 2,000 years ago. (Photo: mrpbps/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).)
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