Slovotvir: Grassroots reform of the Ukrainian language reveals the role of drift and selection in language change.

Authors

Alexey Koshevoy, Oleg Sobchuk, Olivier Morin

Published in

PNAS nexus. Volume 5. Issue 9. Pages pgag258. Epub Sep 03, 2026.

Abstract

Language change involves a complex interplay of selection and drift (or unbiased copying), shaping the popularity of words over time. This pre-registered study examines lexical evolution in the Ukrainian language using data from Slovotvir, a crowdsourcing platform where over 4,000 users proposed and ranked translations of foreign-origin words over 9 years. We rely on an agent-based model combined with novel generative inference methods to investigate the roles of frequency-dependent selection, selection for brevity, and random drift in shaping word popularity. Our results indicate that Slovotvir users exhibit a preference for shorter words, supporting Zipf's principle of least effort. However, the popularity of translations, which we approximate using likes on the platform, appears largely frequency-independent, suggesting that users do not disproportionately favor already popular words. However, this conclusion might be limited by the fact that our data consist of low-frequency neologisms that are still evolving in this population of speakers. These findings contribute to a broader understanding of language change by providing empirical evidence that selection for brevity, rather than frequency-dependent selection, drives lexical evolution in this grassroots language reform initiative, which reflects and shaped real-world language change.

PMID:
42695005
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 04 Sep 2026.

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