Does written language speed up or slow down cultural change?

The written word is one of humanity's most important information technologies. Without it, mathematical and scientific discoveries would be lost to history. But it can also lock ideas in place long after they've stopped making sense.

Russell Gray , a professor in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, heads a research project investigating how writing affects the way languages change. His team uses methods borrowed from evolutionary biology to trace languages through family trees — similar to the way biologists trace species.

Language is one element of culture that researchers can measure to determine whether writing speeds up or slows down cultural change.

"The obvious answer," Gray said, is that writing slows culture down because writing "is all codified and specified and people get trained in it." Gray doesn’t think the obvious answer is necessarily the right one. But other researchers agree that writing can lock in ways of thinking.

"Writing can lead to what learning psychologists sometimes call 'canalization,'" Charles Perreault , an associate professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, told Live Science in an email. "It can narrow the range of ways people think about a problem. When a rule, method, or story is written down, people may come to see it as the correct version … and may not even consider that a better or different way could exist."

Religious texts and legal codes are good examples. In both cases, the interpretation of rules written hundreds ‪—‬ or even thousands ‪—‬ of years ago shapes the way things are done, long after the circumstances that produced them have changed.

Feed your curiosity with an exclusive mystery every week, solved with science and delivered direct to your inbox before it's seen anywhere else.

This idea shows up in artistic expression, too: A 2017 analysis by ethnomusicologist Patrick Savage looked at more than 4,000 British-American ballads from the 16th through 20th centuries and found that written melodies changed less than those shared through oral tradition.