Human language may be shaped by climate and terrain

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LEXICON VALLEY Can Climate Influence Language? Tonal languages evolved mostly in hot and humid places. What would explain that?

By JOHN H. MCWHORTER APRIL 02, 20194:08 PM Listen to Lexicon Valley:

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Extracted text from https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/11/human-language-may-be-shaped-climate-and-terrain:

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WILLIAM S. KUTA/ALAMY Human language may be shaped by climate and terrain

By Emily UnderwoodNov. 4, 2015 , 9:00 AM Why does the Hawaiian language flow melodically from vowel to vowel, whereas Georgian is peppered with consonants? It may have something to do with the climate and terrain where those languages developed, a new study of more than 600 languages from around the world suggests.

Previous research has shown that some other species vocalizations are shaped by their environment. Birds such as the song sparrow, for example, sing at higher pitches in cities, where lower frequency notes would be drowned out by urban noise. And birds living in forested areas tend to sing at lower frequencies than birds living in open spaces, suggesting different species and populations may optimize their vocalizations to travel through branches and other obstacles that deflect high-frequency sounds. The phenomenoncalled acoustic adaptationis seen in species after species, of birds, bats, and other animals, says Caleb Everett, an anthropological linguist at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, who was not involved in the new work.

How much, if any, acoustic adaptation occurs in human languages is unclear, says Ian Maddieson, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. To explore that question, Maddieson and colleague Christophe Coup, of the French National Center for Scientific Researchs Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, combined data on 633 languages worldwide with ecological and climatic information on the regions where those languages developed, excluding internationally spoken languagessuch as English, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanishthat are no longer restricted to the geographic regions where they emerged. SIGN UP FOR OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER Get more great content like this delivered right to you!

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A subtle, but clear pattern emerged: Languages in hotter, more forested regions such as the tropics tended to be sonorous, employing lower frequency sounds and using fewer distinct consonants, whereas languages in colder, drier, more mountainous places were consonant-heavy, the team reported today at the 170th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) in Jacksonville, Florida. Taken together, these ecological variables accounted for about one-fourth of the variation in how consonant-heavy a language is, Maddieson says. One possible explanation for why vowel-rich languages appear more frequently in the tropics is that they travel farther than languages dominated by rapid-fire, high-frequency consonants, which lose their fidelity in humid, forested environments, he says. Heat and humidity interrupt sound, as do solid tree branches and leaves, he adds.

In the study, Maddieson and Coup simply looked at the number of vowels, consonants, and consonants per syllable for each language. Next, they plan to use data taken directly from spoken recordings to examine how these elements are actually put together in a continuous flow of speech, Maddieson says.

The data lend credence to an older, much smaller study of 70 languages, which found a similar pattern, and arevery much in line with studies of acoustic adaptation in other species, Everett says. Although the findings remain purely correlational, and not based on any experimental evidence, he notes, the notion that ecological factors such as tree cover could affect the sounds a language develops is a totally reasonable idea.

*Correction, 6 November, 2:35 p.m.: A previous version of this article referred to Hungarian as a particularly consonant-heavy language. At the request of the study author this has been amended to Georgian.

Posted in: Human Evolution doi:10.1126/science.aad7387

Emily Underwood Emily is a contributing correspondent forScience, covering neuroscience. Email Emily Twitter News from Science has introduced a metered paywall. Full access to all news content is included in AAAS membership. Got a tip? How to contact the news team Advertisement

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Extracted text from https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-how-the-climate-you-live-in-affects-the-way-you-speak:

The distribution of languages with complex tone (red dots) and without complex tone (blue dots). Darker shading on map corresponds to lower mean humidity. Credit: Everett C, Blasi DE, Roberts SG Here's How The Climate You Live in Affects The Way You Speak BEC CREW 3 FEB 2015 Do climate and geography affect the way people speak? Its a question that linguists have debates for years, some saying that the sound systems featured in language are immune to ecological effects, and dont adapt to the way they change, while others argue that environmental factors, such as temperature and elevation, have directly influenced the sound made by certain cultures when they speak.

For example, recent studies have suggested a correlation between phonology - the systematic organisation of sounds in a language - and geographic factors such as temperature, plant cover, and terrain. Other studies have suggested a link between ejective sounds and high elevation. Ejective sounds are characterised by an upward movement of the closed glottis (or vocal folds), and occur only in about 15 percent of languages.

But whats been lacking in these studies is experimental evidence to back up the theories, so a team led by anthropological linguistics professor, Caleb Everett from the University of Miami in the US, decided to investigate. Of the roughly 6,500 known languages spoken around the world, they examined more than 3,700, and analysed data taken from previous experiments on how various properties of the human larynx, or voice box, affect the sounds we make.

They were particularly interested in languages that use pitch or tone to denote meaning. For example, in Mandarin, a person can change the pitch theyre using to change the meaning of a particular word. Of the 3,700 languages they studied, the team identified that 629 of them use whats known as complex tones - making use of three or more tones for sound contrast - and found that they are much more likely to occur in humid, tropical regions of the world. Most of them were found throughout Africa and Southeast Asia, but some were also found in humid regions of North America, Amazonia and New Guinea.

On the other hand, they found that because of the way dry air restricts the movement of a persons vocal cords, these complex tone patterns are unlikely to evolve over a long period of time in arid climates, so people living in the frigid Arctic or in dry desert environments have ended up with more simple tones.

Click here for a larger version of the map above, which was constructed using data from two large independently coded phonological databases,the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures online (WALS)of the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the Phonotactics Database of theAustralian National University (ANU).

"In my estimation, it changes a bit our understanding of how languages evolve. It does not imply that languages are completely determined by climate, but that climate can, over the long haul, be one of the factors that helps shape languages, Everett said in a press release. "More broadly, this suggests another non-conscious way in which humans have adapted to their very different and harsh environments.

Publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team suggests that inhaling dry air can cause dehydration of the voice box, which decreases the elasticity of the vocal folds within. This means that complex deviations of sounds - such as increased jitter and shimmer - are found in very cold or desiccated climates.

But that doesnt mean that climate was the only factor at play when languages were forming in cultural groups all over the world, as Everett explained to Stuart Mason Dambrot at Phys.org. "There are numerous cultural and language-internal factors that shape that evolution. Were just suggesting - in contrast to what linguists generally assume - that ambient aridity is one of them. This latter assumption is, from my perspective, not really supported by much other than traditional dogma, he said.

Everett now wants to figure out if climate has affected the way we open our mouths when we speak, telling Dambrot that perhaps people in warmer climates have evolved to open their mouths more than those faced with much drier ambient air:

There's a hypothesis several anthropologists have put forward that languages in warmer climates tend to have higher rates of mouth opening. Linguists are quite skeptical of this hypothesis, but I think it might be supported and have a similar physiological grounding. Basically, my hypothesis is that languages in very cold climates have higher rates of mouth closure because of the ill-effects of cold and dry air and it seems there may be support for this hypothesis."

MH = Mean humidity. Credit: Everett C, Blasi DE, Roberts SG

Source: Phys.org

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