Is language evolution grinding to a halt? The scaling of lexical turbulence in English fiction suggests it is not

Understand

Of basic interest is the quantification of the long term growth of a language's lexicon as it develops to more completely cover both a culture's communication requirements and knowledge space.

• Here, we explore the usage dynamics of words in the English language as reflected by the Google Books 2012 English Fiction corpus.
• We critique an earlier method that found decreasing birth and increasing death rates of words over the second half of the 20th Century, showing death rates to be strongly affected by the imposed time cutoff of the arbitrary present and not increasing dramatically.
• We provide a robust, principled approach to examining lexical evolution by tracking the volume of word flux across various relative frequency thresholds.