A Computational Approach to Analyzing Language Change and Variation in the Constructed Language Toki Pona
This addresses language evolution for linguists and computational researchers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new constructed language dataset.
The study tackled language change and variation in Toki Pona, a constructed language, by analyzing features like word classes and transitivity across corpora, finding that sociolinguistic factors influence it similarly to natural languages and that it evolves with community use.
This study explores language change and variation in Toki Pona, a constructed language with approximately 120 core words. Taking a computational and corpus-based approach, the study examines features including fluid word classes and transitivity in order to examine (1) changes in preferences of content words for different syntactic positions over time and (2) variation in usage across different corpora. The results suggest that sociolinguistic factors influence Toki Pona in the same way as natural languages, and that even constructed linguistic systems naturally evolve as communities use them.