Just like living organisms, languages change and evolve in quick bursts rather than in a steady pattern, according to an analysis published in the journal Science.

Linguists have long known of specific cases in which the desire for a distinct social identity has caused languages to change quickly. For example American English emerged abruptly when Noah Webster introduced the American English dictionary in 1789, insisting that "as an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government". But it has not previously been known whether such bursts of change are a regular feature of the evolution of human language. The evolutionary study shows that these "punctuational bursts" have taken place in all the main language groups over many thousands of years.