ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
A comparison of worldwide phonemic and genetic variation in human populations.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers.
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Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Operationalizing language-based population stratification for widening access to precision genomics in Africa.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Half a century of quantitative cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
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- Islands are engines of language diversity.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Cultural transmission, networks, and clusters among Austronesian-speaking peoples.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Current research in phonological typology.Linguistic typology · 2023Article
- Integrating Linguistic, Archaeological and Genetic Perspectives Unfold the Origin of Ugrians.Genes · 2023Review
- A genetic and linguistic analysis of the admixture histories of the islands of Cabo Verde.eLife · 2023Article
- Language: Its Origin and Ongoing Evolution.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Review
- A global analysis of matches and mismatches between human genetic and linguistic histories.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Impact of cultural and genetic structure on food choices along the Silk Road.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Genetic structure correlates with ethnolinguistic diversity in eastern and southern Africa.American journal of human genetics · 2022Article
- The genetic legacy of the Manila galleon trade in Mexico.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Hunter-gatherer genomes reveal diverse demographic trajectories during the rise of farming in Eastern Africa.Current biology : CB · 2022Article
- Genetic differentiation between and within Northern Native American language groups: an argument for the expansion of the Native American CODIS database.Forensic sciences research · 2022Article
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6 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Worldwide patterns of genetic variation are driven by human demographic history. Here, we test whether this demographic history has left similar signatures on phonemes-sound units that distinguish meaning between words in languages-to those it has left on genes. We analyze, jointly and in parallel, phoneme inventories from 2,082 worldwide languages and microsatellite polymorphisms from 246 worldwide populations. On a global scale, both genetic distance and phonemic distance between populations are significantly correlated with geographic distance. Geographically close language pairs share significantly more phonemes than distant language pairs, whether or not the languages are closely related. The regional geographic axes of greatest phonemic differentiation correspond to axes of genetic differentiation, suggesting that there is a relationship between human dispersal and linguistic variation. However, the geographic distribution of phoneme inventory sizes does not follow the predictions of a serial founder effect during human expansion out of Africa. Furthermore, although geographically isolated populations lose genetic diversity via genetic drift, phonemes are not subject to drift in the same way: within a given geographic radius, languages that are relatively isolated exhibit more variance in number of phonemes than languages with many neighbors. This finding suggests that relatively isolated languages are more susceptible to phonemic change than languages with many neighbors. Within a language family, phoneme evolution along genetic, geographic, or cognate-based linguistic trees predicts similar ancestral phoneme states to those predicted from ancient sources. More genetic sampling could further elucidate the relative roles of vertical and horizontal transmission in phoneme evolution.
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