# The Dynamics of Norm Change in the Cultural Evolution of Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.04328 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04328/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Emergent social conventions and collective bias in LLM populations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08948/) (2024)
- [A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26396/) (2025)
- [Shaping New Norms for AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08564/) (2023)
- [Model Misalignment and Language Change: Traces of AI-Associated Language in Unscripted Spoken English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00238/) (2025)
- [Reply to "Emergent LLM behaviors are observationally equivalent to data leakage"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18600/) (2025)
- [Self-contained Beta-with-Spikes Approximation for Inference Under a Wright-Fisher Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04691/) (2023)
- [Indirect tipping: a social attack surface in AI agent populations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25194/) (2026)
- [Reliable Detection and Quantification of Selective Forces in Language Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15914/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

What happens when a new social convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change - such as institutions or committed activists - have been identified since a long time, little is known about how a population adopts a new convention, due to the difficulties of finding representative data. Here we address this issue by looking at changes occurred to 2,541 orthographic and lexical norms in English and Spanish through the analysis of a large corpora of books published between the years 1800 and 2008. We detect three markedly distinct patterns in the data, depending on whether the behavioral change results from the action of a formal institution, an informal authority or a spontaneous process of unregulated evolution. We propose a simple evolutionary model able to capture all the observed behaviors and we show that it reproduces quantitatively the empirical data. This work identifies general mechanisms of norm change and we anticipate that it will be of interest to researchers investigating the cultural evolution of language and, more broadly, human collective behavior.