The sound structure of a language is linked to the climate in which the people who speak it live, a new study by scientists from the University of New Mexico (USA) has shown . Thescientific article was published in Frontiers in Psychology .
The authors assessed environmental conditions such as humidity, altitude and temperature, rainfall and vegetation density and how these affect language. The sample included the phonetics of more than 1,000 languages from around the world .
“One suggestion is that at high altitude, for example, you want to conserve moisture in your vocal apparatus , so you’re more likely to use sounds that don’t require you to open your mouth wide . That’s the kind of sound where the vocal cords are closed, so you’re isolating the air in your mouth,” said study co-author Ian Maddison.
Some of the key findings : in regions with higher humidity and temperatures, languages tend to use more vowels and less consonants; languages of people living in high mountain areas tend to have more plosives; and the more humid the climate, the more complex the tone systems of languages.
“There are studies of bird song that show that birds living in cities tend to raise the pitch of their songs to overcome the background noise of cars and things like that. We know that some species are actually adapting to these relatively recent changes, but birds have a much shorter lifespan than humans,” Maddison said.
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