Science Daily (Apr. 15, 2011) — Psychologists from The University of
Auckland have just published two major studies on the diversity of the
world's languages in the journals Science and Nature.
The first study, published in Science by Dr Quentin Atkinson, provides
strong evidence for Africa as the birthplace of human language.
An analysis of languages from around the world suggests that, like our
genes, human speech originated -- just once -- in sub-Saharan Africa.
Atkinson studied the phonemes, or the perceptually distinct units of
sound that differentiate words, used in 504 human languages today and
found that the number of phonemes is highest in Africa and decreases
with increasing distance from Africa.
The fewest phonemes are found in South America and on tropical islands
in the Pacific Ocean. This pattern fits a "serial founder effect"
model in which small populations on the edge of an expansion
progressively lose diversity. Dr Atkinson notes that this pattern of
phoneme usage around the world mirrors the pattern of human genetic
diversity, which also declined as humans expanded their range from
Africa to colonise other regions.
In general, the areas of the globe that were most recently colonised
incorporate fewer phonemes into the local languages whereas the areas
that have hosted modern humans for millennia (particularly sub-Saharan
Africa) still use the most phonemes.
This decline in phoneme usage cannot be explained by demographic
shifts or other local factors, and it provides strong evidence for an
African origin of modern human languages -- as well as parallel
mechanisms that slowly shaped both genetic and linguistic diversity
among humans.
The second study, published in Nature by University of Auckland
researchers Professor Russell Gray and Dr Simon Greenhill and their
colleagues Michael Dunn and Stephen Levinson at the Max Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands challenges the idea
that the human brain produces universal rules for language.
"The diversity of the world's language is amazing," says Professor
Gray. "There are about 7,000 languages spoken today, some with just a
dozen contrastive sounds, others with more than 100, some with complex
patterns of word formation, others with simple words only, some with
the verb at the beginning of the sentence, some in the middle, and
some at the end."
"Our work shows that the claims some linguists have made for a really
strong role of the innate structure of the human mind in shaping
linguistic variation have been hugely oversold," he says.
Using computational methods derived from evolutionary biology, Gray
and his team analysed the global patterns of word-order evolution.
Instead of universal patterns of dependencies in word-order features,
they found that each language family had its own evolutionary
tendencies.
"When it comes to language evolution, culture trumps cognition," Gray
observes.
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