My new paper critically analyses the available evidence (qualitative & quantitative) + defines plausible mechanisms that can be tested in future work with existing data

So stay tuned for more!

Vanuatu’s lingua franca, Bislama, has been learnt by most people as a 2nd language for decades

But it's increasingly the main language of daily life. Linguists' reports reflect growing worries that this is interrupting transmission of local Indigenous languages

What is causing this shift?

Vanuatu is the world’s most language-diverse country: >130 languages amongst 300k people. But is there a language shift ongoing that could threaten this?

The last major review said no. But that was 25 yrs ago. Has the story changed?

In a word––yes.

Thank you! Yeah it was quite a process but, perhaps like wine, I hope some aging has improved the piece haha

Many thanks to my co-authors/supervisors Quentin Atkinson & Ananish Chaudhuri and to my former PhD student compatriates @scottclaessens.bsky.social & @akfischer.bsky.social for their help in the six years since I first started working on this piece back in 2019!

... by presenting evidence that these political dimensions are not unique to Western or industrialised societies, and are not just products of modernisation/the Enlightenment as some others have suggested

We here extend our previous work on the 'dual evolutionary foundations of politics', which argues that the two dimensions of politics reflect two trade-offs in human group living about cooperation vs competition and autonomy vs social control...

(see www.nature.com/articles/s41...)