Evolutionary linguistics

Evolutionary linguistics is a subfield of psycholinguistics that studies the psychosocial and cultural factors involved in the origin of language and the development of linguistic universals. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves practically no traces. This led to the abandonment of the field for more than a century, despite the common origins of language hinted at by the evolutionary relationships among individual languages established by the field of historical linguistics. Since the late 1980s, the field has been revived in the wake of progress made in the related fields of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology, universal grammar, and cognitive science.