演化语言学，是对人类原始语言的发展，及其社会行为演化的科学。由于语言的声音转眼即逝，令到这学科研究欠缺原始数据。因此过去百多年，这学科都难以发展。由19世界80年代后期起，这学科与心理语言学、神经语言学、演化心理学、普遍文法、认知科学等学科兴起跨学科研究，使演化语言学再为兴盛。

Evolutionary linguistics is a subfield of psycholinguistics that studies the psychosocial and cultural factors involved in the origin of language and the development of linguistic universals. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves practically no traces. This led to the abandonment of the field for more than a century, despite the common origins of language hinted at by the evolutionary relationships among individual languages established by the field of historical linguistics. Since the late 1980s, the field has been revived in the wake of progress made in the related fields of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology, universal grammar, and cognitive science.