Frequency and stability of linguistic variants

Recent research has shown that there is a direct relationship between frequency and stability of linguistic variants: the more frequent a given variant is, the less it tends to change over time. This relationship holds basic relevance for language evolution: not only can it inform increasingly accurate deep language phylogenies (as in Pagel, Atkinson, Calude, & Meade, 2013), but we will argue it can also provide a unique window into the evolutionary dynamics of language systems, shedding light on the interplay between stability at the system level and instability at the word level...