Children are not the main agents of language change

The long-standing claim that young children are the main agents of language change is often presented as an established fact that has tacitly guided research in developmental science and evolutionary linguistics. It rests on the assumption that language change arises from language acquisition errors predominantly committed by children. Here, we review whether arguments in support of this idea stand up to logical and empirical scrutiny. We conclude that while children’s imperfect learning indeed leads them to produce input-divergent linguistic variants, there is no convincing evidence that it is these child-generated innovations that eventually spread through the language community, nor that language change is mainly driven by constraints and biases operating uniquely in children. By exposing the conceptual and empirical shortcomings of overemphasizing children as the agents of language change, we hope to rebalance the field towards a more nuanced understanding of how individual- and population-level processes shape language change.