The Death of Language: Edinburgh Linguistics Society Soap Vox Lecture

[seemysig]

06:10 - language is part of human culture - so the traditional name for "genes for language" - would be "memes". If you want a language-specific concept there's "linguemes".

[SeanGeraintRoberts]

@seemysig The 'meme' concept is a useful one, but quite vague - it refers to a 'linguistic unit', but it's unclear what the unit is - a word, a phrase, an idea. All I'm trying to say is that languages are not a tangible linguistic unit in an evolutionary timescale.