Luck plays a role in how language evolves, team finds

Read a few lines of Chaucer or Shakespeare and you’ll get a sense of how the English language has changed during the past millennium. Examining collections of annotated texts dating from the 12th to the 21st centuries, researchers found that certain linguistic changes were guided by pressures analogous to natural selection — social, cognitive and other factors — while others seem to have occurred purely by happenstance.
Strange & Offbeat: Fossils & Ruins News — ScienceDaily