Half a century ago, Uriel Weinreich, William Labov, and Marvin Herzog laid out a programmatic vision for the study of language change. This included establishing five fundamental problems for the field and a radical shift from a focus on idiolects to a focus on population-level change (grounded in their concept of orderly heterogeneity). They also expressed an explicit desire to see an integrated evolutionary study of language change. In spite of this, the newer fields of language evolution and cultural evolution make little contact with the field of sociolinguistics that emerged out of their work. Here we lay out a program, grounded in their five problems, for a more integrated future. We situate each problem in modern sociolinguistics and identify promising points for theoretical exchange, making comparisons with Tinbergen’s four questions, which play a similar role in the evolutionary sciences. Finally, we propose cultural-evolutionary experiments for making empirical progress.

半个世纪前，乌里尔·魏因里希（Ureel Weinreich），威廉·拉博夫（William Labov）和马文·赫尔佐格（Marvin Herzog）为研究语言变化提出了程序化愿景。这包括建立该领域的五个基本问题，以及从关注菊苣到关注种群水平变化的根本转变（基于他们有序异质性的概念）。他们还明确表示希望看到有关语言变化的综合进化研究。尽管如此，语言进化和文化进化的新领域与他们工作中出现的社会语言学领域几乎没有联系。在这里，我们基于他们的五个问题制定了一个程序，以实现更完整的未来。我们将每个问题放在现代社会语言学中，并找出有希望进行理论交流的点，并与廷伯格根的四个问题进行比较，在进化科学中起着类似的作用。最后，我们提出文化进化实验以取得经验性进展。