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Societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages
Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The linguistic niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial proportions of nonnative speakers (societies of strangers) tend to lose grammatical distinctions. In contrast, languages in smal...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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American Association for the Advancement of Science
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10431698/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37585533 http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adf7704 |
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author | Shcherbakova, Olena Michaelis, Susanne Maria Haynie, Hannah J. Passmore, Sam Gast, Volker Gray, Russell D. Greenhill, Simon J. Blasi, Damián E. Skirgård, Hedvig |
author_facet | Shcherbakova, Olena Michaelis, Susanne Maria Haynie, Hannah J. Passmore, Sam Gast, Volker Gray, Russell D. Greenhill, Simon J. Blasi, Damián E. Skirgård, Hedvig |
author_sort | Shcherbakova, Olena |
collection | PubMed |
description | Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The linguistic niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial proportions of nonnative speakers (societies of strangers) tend to lose grammatical distinctions. In contrast, languages in small, isolated communities should maintain or expand their grammatical markers. Here, we test these claims using a global dataset of grammatical structures, Grambank. We model the impact of the number of native speakers, the proportion of nonnative speakers, the number of linguistic neighbors, and the status of a language on grammatical complexity while controlling for spatial and phylogenetic autocorrelation. We deconstruct “grammatical complexity” into two separate dimensions: how much morphology a language has (“fusion”) and the amount of information obligatorily encoded in the grammar (“informativity”). We find several instances of weak positive associations but no inverse correlations between grammatical complexity and sociodemographic factors. Our findings cast doubt on the widespread claim that grammatical complexity is shaped by the sociolinguistic environment. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10431698 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | American Association for the Advancement of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-104316982023-08-17 Societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages Shcherbakova, Olena Michaelis, Susanne Maria Haynie, Hannah J. Passmore, Sam Gast, Volker Gray, Russell D. Greenhill, Simon J. Blasi, Damián E. Skirgård, Hedvig Sci Adv Social and Interdisciplinary Sciences Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The linguistic niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial proportions of nonnative speakers (societies of strangers) tend to lose grammatical distinctions. In contrast, languages in small, isolated communities should maintain or expand their grammatical markers. Here, we test these claims using a global dataset of grammatical structures, Grambank. We model the impact of the number of native speakers, the proportion of nonnative speakers, the number of linguistic neighbors, and the status of a language on grammatical complexity while controlling for spatial and phylogenetic autocorrelation. We deconstruct “grammatical complexity” into two separate dimensions: how much morphology a language has (“fusion”) and the amount of information obligatorily encoded in the grammar (“informativity”). We find several instances of weak positive associations but no inverse correlations between grammatical complexity and sociodemographic factors. Our findings cast doubt on the widespread claim that grammatical complexity is shaped by the sociolinguistic environment. American Association for the Advancement of Science 2023-08-16 /pmc/articles/PMC10431698/ /pubmed/37585533 http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adf7704 Text en Copyright © 2023 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Social and Interdisciplinary Sciences Shcherbakova, Olena Michaelis, Susanne Maria Haynie, Hannah J. Passmore, Sam Gast, Volker Gray, Russell D. Greenhill, Simon J. Blasi, Damián E. Skirgård, Hedvig Societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages |
title | Societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages |
title_full | Societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages |
title_fullStr | Societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages |
title_full_unstemmed | Societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages |
title_short | Societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages |
title_sort | societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages |
topic | Social and Interdisciplinary Sciences |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10431698/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37585533 http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adf7704 |
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