Cross-linguistic Semantic Stability as a Driving Force of Diachronic Semantic Evolution across Lexica

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.