Abstract
<p>Word meanings change over time, yet the rate of this change varies systematically within each lexicon. While frequency, age of acquisition, and concreteness have been identified as within-language predictors of semantic change rate, a language-general account of why some concepts resist diachronic drift more persistently than others worldwide has remained elusive. Here, we propose that cross-linguistic semantic stability — the degree to which a concept’s semantic neighborhood is conserved across languages — functions as a fundamental, conceptual-level constraint on diachronic semantic evolution across lexica. We operationalized semantic stability as neighborhood overlap between a target concept’s nearest neighbors in English and the back-translated neighbors of its translation equivalents across 10-to-41 languages, and quantified diachronic semantic change as neighborhood turnover in historical embeddings spanning up to 100 years in English, French, German, and Chinese. Concepts with higher cross-linguistic stability exhibited significantly slower diachronic semantic change within each language and, critically, across lexica when datasets were aggregated cross-linguistically to derive concepts’ change rates. This constraining effect dominated all other predictors for shared concepts; survived controls for well-established psycholinguistic predictors; was structurally confirmed through partial-correlation networks as a direct, unmediated constraint; remained robust under iterative sample expansion of cross-lingual concept sets; and was replicated using historically derived stability estimates. Altogether, our findings reveal that the topological consistency of a concept’s semantic neighborhood across the world’s languages reflects a temporally durable cognitive-communicative constraint that actively governs the pace of meaning change, bridging synchronic cross-linguistic aligned conceptual structure with the diachronic dynamics of lexical evolution across lexica.</p>