We are all different when it comes to language, and it matters...

It is so obvious as to be taken for granted: we're all different when it comes to language, be it in how we speak, how many words we know, how well we hear in noisy environments, or how good we are at learning that new foreign language. We all have our own biases, which means that we tend to do things our own way, be that almost imperceptibly or for everybody to see. In the latter category, one may think of people that cannot say the pesky "trilled r" even in their own native language (such as myself).We used to think that such individual variation or idiosyncrasies are "smoothed out" by our collective use of language, composed of myriad acts of interaction and learning, repeated during our lifetimes and across generations, resulting in a sort of "average linguistic behavior" that makes irrelevant any such bias, especially the weak ones.However, in a series of studies led by Mathilde Josserand and inspired by my own linguistic biases, together with a large international team, we have shown, using computer models and funny experiments with real people, that this is not necessarily the case: the "tyranny of the masses" might be an exaggeration, especially in structured networks where not everybody talks to everybody else, not with the same frequency, nor in the same manner. In such stations, even relatively weak individual biases might not only survive, but even sometimes be amplified to "color" the language of the whole community!To make things clear: let's play a game with three other people, where you have to name a cute little alien that only you see using a computer keyboard, in such a way that another player (who does not see it) can, nevertheless, pick it up from among a set of such cute little aliens (see the figure). Importantly, we designed the initial language in such a way as to make heavy use of the letters "a" and "k" which, unbeknownst to the players, don't work on your keyboard, so you are forced to "mistype" the alien's name. What do the others do? Surprisingly, they tend to accept your idiosyncrasy by adapting the names they use, dropping "a" and "k"!Now, that's a cheery thought as 2025 starts in a polarized world...