Reconciling the father tongue and mother tongue hypotheses in Indo-European populations

In opposition to the mother tongue hypothesis, the father tongue hypothesis states that humans tend to speak their fathers’ language, based on a stronger correlation of languages to paternal lineages (Y-chromosome) than to maternal lineages (mitochondria). To reassess these two competing hypotheses, we conducted a genetic–linguistic study of 34 modern Indo-European (IE) populations. In this study, genetic histories of paternal and maternal migrations in these IE populations were elucidated using phylogenetic networks of Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA haplogroups, respectively. Unlike previous studies, we quantitatively characterized the languages based on lexical and phonemic systems separately. We showed that genetic and linguistic distances are significantly correlated with each other and that both are correlated with geographical distances among these populations. However, when controlling for geographical factors, only the correlation between the distances of paternal and lexical characteristics, and between those of maternal and phonemic characteristics, remained. These unbalanced correlations reconciled the two seemingly conflicting hypotheses.