Academic year 2026-2027
This is the webpage for the Honours/MSc course Origins and Evolution of Language, running in academic year 2026/2027 (semester 1). I will add links to materials (readings, workshop exercises, lecture slides etc) to this page; you will need to use Learn for electronic submission of your assessed work, to keep an eye on announcements, and for participation in pre-lecture quizzes.
We will review current theories which attempt to explain how and why human language evolved, covering both the biological evolution of the human capacity for language, and cultural evolution of languages themselves. Modern evolutionary linguistics is a highly interdisciplinary field, and we will touch on the basics of evolutionary biology, animal communication and animal cognition, fieldwork on emerging sign languages, and computational models and experimental studies of language evolution pioneered here in Edinburgh, among other topics. No prior knowledge of these areas is assumed.
The course organiser and lecturer is Kenny Smith (that’s me). The best way to get in touch with me is in one of the lectures, see below, or by email to kenny.smith@ed.ac.uk.
Workshops will be run with help from my colleague Simon Kirby.
Lectures take place on Mondays, 2.10pm-4pm, in LG.11, 40 George Square - this is in the basement, round the back of the coffee shop.
You will be allocated to a workshop group which will meet for 1 hour later in the week (Wednesday or Thursday). There are no workshops in week 1 - workshops start in week 2 (week commencing 28th September).
Lectures and workshops are both essential to doing well on the course - the lectures provide a broad overview of major issues in the evolution of language, and the workshops give you the opportunity to discuss more specific topics in detail with your classmates, guided by your tutor. Attendance will be taken at workshops.
The course is assessed in a single final exam, composed of short-answer questions, worth 100% of your course mark. The exam assesses material covered in the readings, lectures, and workshops. The reading quiz (see below) provides exam-style questions on the readings, and provides you with an opportunity to practice these questions and get feedback on your answers.
Each week’s lecture reading will be accompanied by a reading quiz; we will also do in-class questions (as a tool to check understanding or promote discussion).
In order to encourage you to complete the reading and to allow you (and me) to check whether you actually understood it, you need to complete weekly reading quizzes prior to the Monday lectures (starting in week 2). Quizzes will open as soon as I have written them (I’ll get them all up as fast as I can) and close at noon on the day of the lecture they go with (e.g. the quiz for the week 2 lecture will close at noon on Monday of week 2, 2 hours before the lecture). You can access the reading quizzes on Learn, through the link “Pre-lecture quizzes”.
The quiz is not assessed and does not contribute to your mark for the course. The quizzes serve two functions: they are intended to help you learn stuff, which is what the course is for, and they will give you some idea of the kinds of questions we might ask in the final exam. People who answer the questions will also get to see my notes on how I would answer those questions, and any additional thoughts I have; where appropriate I will also provide a little feedback on your answer.
We will use multiple-choice questions in class to stimulate discussion - we will use wooclap for these. To participate during the lectures go to wooclap.com and enter the event code provided.
Course content will appear here as we work through the course - I will put materials up as far in advance as possible, to enable you to read ahead where you can.
Each week there will be two sets of readings: one associated with the lecture, and another for the workshop.
Lecture readings involves a reading (journal articles/book chapters) plus a blog post introducing the topic and highlighting any important points. I expect you to do these readings before the associated lectures since they provide useful background information and context to what I say in lectures - I will assume you have done the readings in class, and you’ll have to talk about them. As mentioned above, in order to encourage you to complete the reading and to allow you to check whether you actually understood it, there is also a reading quiz to be completed before each class.
For the workshops you will be asked to read one or more journal articles/book chapters and then turn up prepared to discuss these in small groups in the workshops. Workshops give you the opportunity to clarify points you didn’t understand with your classmates, but also discuss interesting points, strengths and weaknesses of the papers, and get some practice critically evaluating research in language evolution. For some weeks you will be asked to read papers that make conflicting claims and then use the workshop time to debate the merits of the two approaches with your classmates.
Use the time to catch up or read ahead.
This week’s lecture will be a guest lecture by Dr. Annie Holtz.
This will be a short recap on the course and a chance to discuss the upcoming exam.
This course has evolved over the years - the course in something like its current form was originally written by Kenny Smith, based on a preceding course created by Jim Hurford, and contributions and modifications have been made by James Winters, Marieke Schouwstra, Christine Cuskley and Matt Spike.
All aspects of this work are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.