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Related Concept Videos

Language Development01:22

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Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
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The shape and tempo of language evolution.

S J Greenhill1, Q D Atkinson, A Meade

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland 1042, New Zealand. s.greenhill@auckland.ac.nz

Proceedings. Biological Sciences
|April 9, 2010
PubMed
Summary

Linguistic features offer insights into deep language relationships. Typological features evolve similarly to vocabulary but are less predictable, challenging deep historical linguistic analysis.

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Area of Science:

  • Computational linguistics
  • Historical linguistics
  • Language evolution

Background:

  • Human language diversity reflects thousands of years of cultural evolution.
  • Tracing deep language relationships is limited by lexical evolution rates (6,000-10,000 years).
  • Stable linguistic features, analogous to conserved genes in biology, may reveal deeper connections.

Observation:

  • The study introduces the first global language network based on typological information.
  • It evaluates the evolutionary rates of typological and lexical features in Austronesian and Indo-European languages.
  • Typological features show similar evolutionary rates to basic vocabulary.

Findings:

  • Typological feature evolution is substantially less tree-like than lexical evolution.
  • Vocabulary change rates are correlated across the studied language families.
  • Rates of typological feature evolution and structural subtypes show no consistent relationship across families.

Implications:

  • Typological features may not reliably trace the deepest language relationships due to less predictable evolutionary patterns.
  • Understanding varied evolutionary rates is crucial for reconstructing language histories.
  • This network provides a novel approach to studying global linguistic diversity and historical connections.