Linguistic Group Marking as an Emergent Phenomenon

Cormac Moran , Judit Casas-Riu, Cedric Boeckx

This paper examines how linguistic group marking can emerge from the interaction between social ecology, inferential cognition, and cultural transmission. An agent-based model (ABM) simulates interactions within a structured population where agents use domain-general inference and social learning to interpret and adopt linguistic variants. The model implements a mechanism in which uncertainty about strangers’ social affiliations increases reliance on social inference and investigates how variation in social memory and outgroup contact affects the resulting patterns of linguistic variation. Results show that under conditions of greater perceived social risk, the model produces greater use of inference and, subsequently, greater linguistic differentiation between groups. However, differentiation remains concentrated in particular linguistic features rather than producing a complete divergence of group repertoires. These findings suggest that linguistic group marking, characteristic of human language, can be understood as an emergent property of social conditions rather than a specialised adaptation. The model therefore provides a possible sociocognitive mechanism contributing to the broader process of linguistic polyphilia, while more generally aligning with accounts of complex linguistic structures as arising from domain-general cognition interacting with cultural evolution.