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Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants oflinguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous tomutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply arecently-introduced method to corpus data to quantify the strength of selectionin specific instances of historical language change. We first demonstrate, inthe context of English irregular verbs, that this method is more reliable andinterpretable than similar methods that have previously been applied. Wefurther extend this study to demonstrate that a bias towards phonologicalsimplicity overrides that favouring grammatical simplicity when these are inconflict. Finally, with reference to Spanish spelling reforms, we show that themethod can also detect points in time at which selection strengths change, afeature that is generically expected for socially-motivated language change.Together, these results indicate how hypotheses for mechanisms of languagechange can be tested quantitatively using historical corpus data.

Reliable Detection and Quantification of Selective Forces in Language Change