LANGUAGE RESEARCH
Contact and isolation as drivers of diversity
Anthropological factors are said to shape languages more than environmental factors.
The seclusion of this Georgian mountain village has a bigger impact on language than its altitude. | Image: Tomas Malik/Unsplash
Contact among languages and the isolation of highland communities are now seen as drivers of language diversity. A joint study by the Institute of Biology at the University of Neuchâtel and the University of Tübingen (Germany) highlights the importance of anthropological rather than environmental factors in the evolution of languages.
The starting point of the study is ejective and uvular consonants. Ejectives are articulated through the glottis rather than the lungs. They are rare, have a ‘popping’ sound, and are heard mainly in communities living at high altitudes, e.g., in the Andes, the African Rift or the Caucasus. Uvulars are also rare and have a similar geographical distribution despite a very different pronunciation. “We wanted to check whether these sounds appeared and persisted because of the environment or whether indirect factors, such as the relative isolation of mountain communities, could explain their geographical distribution”, says Steven Moran, an assistant professor at the University of Neuchâtel.
The team adopted a multidisciplinary approach. They used a database of world languages (Phoible), which they cross-referenced with a catalogue of their geographical distribution (Glottlog) and with data relating to altitude. They then used computational linguistics to model the development of the two categories of sounds over time. Finally, they performed an in-depth study of the literature related to the appearance of this type of sound.
The results showed that contacts among language communities would have played a very important role in the spread of these sounds in high-altitude settings. The environment would therefore only play an indirect role, contrary to a recent theory (Caleb Everett, 2013), which pointed to the dry air and atmospheric pressure of the highlands as explanations for the appearance of these consonants.
