This paper is part of an ongoing research program to understand the cognitive and functional bases for the origins and evolution of spatial language. Following a cognitive-functional approach, we first investigate the cross-linguistic variety in spatial language, with special attention for spatial perspective. Based on this language-typological data, we hypothesize which cognitive mechanisms are needed to explain this variety and argue for an interdisciplinary approach to test these hypotheses. We then explain how experiments in artificial language evolution can contribute to that and give a concrete example.
