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Would a race/species that lives twice as long as humans experience linguistic evolution at half the rate of humans? If not, would it be slowed down at all? Would any cultural characteristics have a noticeable effect (e.g. extreme cultural conservatism slowing it down)?
If this wouldn't have a noticeable effect, what other factors might contribute to one culture speaking a much more "archaic" descendant of a proto-language than another culture with whom they have significant contact?
There are various aspects to linguistic drift to consider. The example that comes to mind is American Southern English, which preserves archaic words like "yonder", but also pushes the vowel shift such that using "drunk" as the past-tense of "drink" is necessary because "drink" and "drank" are pronounced more or less the same[1]. See also: Yorkshire English preserving rimnants of thou and thee long after they fell into disuse in most other dialects.
There's also the matter of top-down influences. Using English again, most of our whacky spelling comes from the establishing of standards more or less mid vowel-shift, so everyone kept writing for the old pronunciation, but speaking with the new. There's also the way in which "thou" fell out of use, which is to say, it became seen as rude and low-class[2], which trickled to the rest of the Anglophone world from the well-connected politeness-influencers of the Elizabethan era. Compare to the 20th and 21st centuries, where regional dialects in the US rapidly started to flatten with the spread of mass media, especially movies and national television programs. The English of today is certainly mutually understandable with the English of the earliest audio recordings, but I doubt many would have trouble distinguishing Edwardian English from Millennial English, for most dialects.
As for life-span, life expectancy has increased over the past 150 years, but mass media and the overall rate of cultural and technological change has made it such that one could argue that Millennials and GenZ are speaking different dialects from their grandparents, especially if they're from a region with less media influence. Meanwhile, the life-expectancy among American Southerners, and indeed most of their ancestors all the way back to the Scotch Irish[3], have generally had below-average life-expectancies, but have arguably been slower to change.
My conclusion, then, is that, if longer life-spans would slow linguistic drift, it must come with the old having a great deal of cultural influence, and perhaps even some stagnation besides. It seems that things like pronunciation are more likely to change randomly, whereas the loss of archaic words and phrases is more likely to come from being connected to the wider cultural influencers. Isolation and rurality seem better predictors of archaicisms than lifespan, but it seems that isolation and rurality negatively correlate with lifespan. So long-lived, insular, gerintocratic rural subcultures seem like the most stable.
* I am not a linguist. On the off chance this answer seems acceptable, please do wait to see if an actual linguist shows up and tears it apart.
Regardless of how we learn it, language is constantly evolving for a very simple reason; our lives are constantly changing. New social interactions and methods arise and replace old ones as different ways of seeing the world fall in and out of fashion, technology both encroaches upon us and enables us to do things we thought impossible before, and we need new words to describe that over time. Further, anyone who has ever traveled abroad for an extended period often returns with a bit of an accent or an odd turn of phrase picked up while living away, and that is a good thing.
Sure, we pick up language from our parents and teachers when we are young, and therefore our adaptability to new phonemes and words and concepts is far more pronounced during that time but it never goes away. If it did, it would literally make it impossible to learn new things as we could only incorporate ideas for which we developed a vocabulary before a certain age and life just doesn't work like that. At least, not for the sufficiently curious. Further, the fact that people learn new languages as adults for work or pleasure proves this point completely. An extended lifespan may reduce our adaptability somewhat but it isn't the material factor in the evolution of language; the rate of external change is.
Want proof of this? Well, in England, you have the Annual Royal Christmas Message. This is really useful for testing the proposition of change of language because it's been delivered by the same person for an extended period - a person whose contact with the general population is somewhat controlled but still there, and there are recordings of it around the place that you can access.
As an exercise, find as many of them as you can, and play them in sequence. Does the Queen's voice change? Does her use of words? Does the prevailing theme change over time? Does she use words in later recordings that were not in general use in the 30's for instance? I think the results might surprise you.
In short, the length of a lifespan may have a factor in the rate of change, but that is overwhelmed by the rate of change within society and that is what really drives the need for language to evolve. It's the concepts we discuss among ourselves, the new devices and technology that enable new ways of doing things and new practices, all of which need names, that really changes how we approach language and as such, is the principle driver in the way language changes.
As an aside though, if you look at linguistic theories like Grimm's Law you'll also begin to see that language has to be convenient, and language tends to migrate from complex forms and difficult sounds to make down to simpler forms and more convenient sounds at a rate which is proportional to the commonality of the word that's evolving. That is going to happen regardless of how long someone lives.
In my opinion, linguistic evolution would be accelerated within a long lived species.
A pre-lingual individual, who discovers the fundamentals of language and develops a simple vocabularies of grunts and hand-gestures, would benefit from improved tribe organization and cooperation with her peers. That benefit, experienced within a single long life, would accumulate, inspiring her to expand the original vocabulary and apply the idea of language to more and more aspects of her life.
Shorter lived species would have less remaining lifetime left, after first learning language and then realizing its benefits, to achieve such expansion and broadening of use. In the same span of time that a single long lived speaker learns, uses and grows their language, several generations of shorter lived speakers would attempt the same achievement. But each of those shorter lived generations would spend a larger relative percentage of their life learning language, while their longer lived alternative only has to learn once.
So in my opinion, longer lived species will develop language quicker and achieve more complex language characteristics than their shorter lived equivalents.
In English linguistic drift essentially stopped once literacy became common. Shakespeare's English is still mostly understandable now, although there are changes in meaning, some odd constructions.
Go back to the Canterbury tales, and it's a lot harder -- a lot mroe than the increase from 400 years to 600 years would seem appropriate. Big difference was that more people could read and write. A written language doesn't change much.
