Reviewed by Christopher S. Doty, University of Oregon

In Selfish sounds and linguistic evolution, Nikolaus Ritt argues that language change—far from being a random, arbitrary process as normally conceived—is in fact a principled process, which is best understood within the context of Darwinian evolutionary theory. R’s framework is a direct outgrowth of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, which he thoroughly reviews (Ch. 4). Briefly, the neo-Darwinian framework posits that natural selection, rather than acting on entire species or on individual members of a species, is best conceived of as acting at the level of individual genes. Perhaps the best-known presentation of this theoretical framework is Richard Dawkins’ The selfish gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). In this work, Dawkins cogently argues that genes are the primary locus of natural selection and that organisms can be likened to tools, created through millennia of selection pressure on genes to aid their own propagation. It was in this same work that Dawkins proposed the idea of the meme: a cognitive entity, parallel to the biological entity of the gene, which is capable of reproducing itself with a high degree of fidelity from one mind to another. If these memes are in fact replicators in a manner similar to genes, then it stands to reason that they might also be selected for in a Darwinian fashion.

Herein lies the foundation of R’s argument: if language can be conceived of in terms of a set of memes that replicate themselves from the minds of speakers to the minds of language learners, then one ought to expect general principles of neo-Darwinian selection to apply to language change. That is to say, language change can be thought of as the gradual replacement of various properties of the system by new variants during the process of speaker-learner transmission (i.e. language change arises as a direct results of memetic ‘mutations’). From here, R moves on to an in-depth discussion of just why language should be considered a complex, adaptive system that is parallel to other biological systems and thus subject to the same pressures (Chs. 5–6).

Perhaps the greatest contribution of this work is a first attempt at developing a methodology for identifying what ought to count as a replicator in language and thus be under the purview of selection pressures (Ch. 7). By applying this methodology to a variety of levels of language, R argues that memes are present in language from the level of individual phonemes up to the level of supresegmentals. R then turns to two case studies (Chs. 8–9) to demonstrate how this framework can provide solutions to traditionally difficult problems.

Overall, R presents a strong case for considering language change within the principled, empirical framework of neo-Darwinism and memetics. Rather than dismissing many aspects of language change as simple historical accidents, R cogently argues that understanding language as a complex biological system allows us to integrate language change within a more general conceptual framework that also includes human cognition and natural selection.