Do languages really "evolve"?

(ETA: Don’t know why this isn’t showing up in time order, but it should be at the top of the thread, since it was what Al-Khalil was responding to in the first post.)

Linguists say languages evolve and that languages can be organized into phylogenic trees, and there are parallels between biological evolution and language change. Clearly the processes differ on multiple levels. The similarities however, are not uniquely noted by BioLogos contributors. Speaking of the evolution of languages and the ancestry of language families is standard in the field of linguistics.

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