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Altitude and the distributional typology of language structure: Ejectives and beyond

The first decades of the 21st century have witnessed a renewed interest in the relationship between language structure and the various social and ecological niches in which the languages of the world are used and against the background of which they evolved. In this context, Everett (2013) argued fo...

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Autores principales: Urban, Matthias, Moran, Steven
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7864408/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33544750
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245522
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author Urban, Matthias
Moran, Steven
author_facet Urban, Matthias
Moran, Steven
author_sort Urban, Matthias
collection PubMed
description The first decades of the 21st century have witnessed a renewed interest in the relationship between language structure and the various social and ecological niches in which the languages of the world are used and against the background of which they evolved. In this context, Everett (2013) argued for direct geographical influences on the sound structure of languages. It was observed that ejective consonants, produced with a sudden burst of non-pulmonic air to a salient acoustic effect, tend to occur in high-altitude environments in which these sounds may be adaptive due to a reduced articulatory effort and/or to prevent desiccation. Here, we evaluate this claim and at the same time place it into a broader context. We observe that the distribution of another class of typologically unusual sounds, uvulars, is highly similar to that of ejectives, but that the proposed explanations are not available to account for the similar geographical patterning of uvulars. Hence, we test an alternative explanatory account that would posit indirect rather than direct environmental influences on language structure that are mediated by anthropological factors, in particular the relative sociolinguistic isolation of speech communities at the highest altitudes. Applying Bayesian Logistic Mixed Effects Regression to a large database of phonological inventories of the world’s languages, however, we do not find strong support for either a correlation of ejectives or uvulars with high-altitude environments, though the association is somewhat stronger for ejectives than uvulars. A phylogenetic exploration of the development of both classes of sounds in two large language families spoken in widely different environments, Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan, together with a qualitative assessment of the dedicated literature, in contrast, suggests a strong role of language contact rather than environmental factors.
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spelling pubmed-78644082021-02-12 Altitude and the distributional typology of language structure: Ejectives and beyond Urban, Matthias Moran, Steven PLoS One Research Article The first decades of the 21st century have witnessed a renewed interest in the relationship between language structure and the various social and ecological niches in which the languages of the world are used and against the background of which they evolved. In this context, Everett (2013) argued for direct geographical influences on the sound structure of languages. It was observed that ejective consonants, produced with a sudden burst of non-pulmonic air to a salient acoustic effect, tend to occur in high-altitude environments in which these sounds may be adaptive due to a reduced articulatory effort and/or to prevent desiccation. Here, we evaluate this claim and at the same time place it into a broader context. We observe that the distribution of another class of typologically unusual sounds, uvulars, is highly similar to that of ejectives, but that the proposed explanations are not available to account for the similar geographical patterning of uvulars. Hence, we test an alternative explanatory account that would posit indirect rather than direct environmental influences on language structure that are mediated by anthropological factors, in particular the relative sociolinguistic isolation of speech communities at the highest altitudes. Applying Bayesian Logistic Mixed Effects Regression to a large database of phonological inventories of the world’s languages, however, we do not find strong support for either a correlation of ejectives or uvulars with high-altitude environments, though the association is somewhat stronger for ejectives than uvulars. A phylogenetic exploration of the development of both classes of sounds in two large language families spoken in widely different environments, Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan, together with a qualitative assessment of the dedicated literature, in contrast, suggests a strong role of language contact rather than environmental factors. Public Library of Science 2021-02-05 /pmc/articles/PMC7864408/ /pubmed/33544750 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245522 Text en © 2021 Urban, Moran http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Urban, Matthias
Moran, Steven
Altitude and the distributional typology of language structure: Ejectives and beyond
title Altitude and the distributional typology of language structure: Ejectives and beyond
title_full Altitude and the distributional typology of language structure: Ejectives and beyond
title_fullStr Altitude and the distributional typology of language structure: Ejectives and beyond
title_full_unstemmed Altitude and the distributional typology of language structure: Ejectives and beyond
title_short Altitude and the distributional typology of language structure: Ejectives and beyond
title_sort altitude and the distributional typology of language structure: ejectives and beyond
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7864408/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33544750
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245522
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