When the Feature Pool Goes Algorithmic: Extending Mufwene's Ecology of Language Evolution to LLM-Mediated Exposure
Mufwene's ecological model locates language evolution in competition among variants contributed by individual idiolects and in speakers' selection from linguistic material made available through interaction. Large language models (LLMs) complicate this architecture without requiring the locus of selection to move away from human speakers. This article argues that LLMs are best treated as distributional mediators: they aggregate language produced across human populations, transform its distribution through training and post-training, and redistribute model-specific outputs at scale. I call the resulting ecological process algorithmic reweighting of the speaker-accessible distribution: mode...
| Authors | Kunmei Han |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 21 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 August 2026 |
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