Wait, what? This is a ‘distinction’? I just googled ‘do languages evolve’ out of curiosity, and got back a lot of results examining scientifically how they change and develop. If they weren’t using the word evolve they wouldn’t have appeared in the search results.
I am interested in which “not just fringe” linguists conscientiously avoid using the word “evolve” in all their work, on bizarre moral principles, because I took multiple linguistics classes in college and never heard that this was at all an issue.