ArticleFrontiers in psychology2017
Languages in Drier Climates Use Fewer Vowels.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- When the City Speaks: How Urban Form Shapes the Cultural Transmission of Spatial Conceptualization.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Investigating environmental effects on phonology using diachronic models.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Editorial: The adaptive value of languages: non-linguistic causes of language diversity, volume II.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Article
- Current research in phonological typology.Linguistic typology · 2023Article
- Language: Its Origin and Ongoing Evolution.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Review
- Ultraviolet light affects the color vocabulary: evidence from 834 languages.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Aerosols, airflow, and more: examining the interaction of speech and the physical environment.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Demonstrating environmental impacts on the sound structure of languages: challenges and solutions.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- The sounds of prehistoric speech.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- The vocal tract as a time machine: inferences about past speech and language from the anatomy of the speech organs.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Speech adapts to differences in dentition within and across populations.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Robust, Causal, and Incremental Approaches to Investigating Linguistic Adaptation.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This study offers evidence for an environmental effect on languages while relying on continuous linguistic and continuous ecological variables. Evidence is presented for a positive association between the typical ambient humidity of a language's native locale and that language's degree of reliance on vowels. The vowel-usage rates of over 4000 language varieties were obtained, and several methods were employed to test whether these usage rates are associated with ambient humidity. The results of these methods are generally consistent with the notion that reduced ambient humidity eventually yields a reduced reliance of languages on vowels, when compared to consonants. The analysis controls simultaneously for linguistic phylogeny and contact between languages. The results dovetail with previous work, based on binned data, suggesting that consonantal phonemes are more common in some ecologies. In addition to being based on continuous data and a larger data sample, however, these findings are tied to experimental research suggesting that dry air affects the behavior of the larynx by yielding increased phonatory effort. The results of this study are also consistent with previous work suggesting an interaction of aridity and tonality. The data presented here suggest that languages may evolve, like the communication systems of other species, in ways that are influenced subtly by ecological factors. It is stressed that more work is required, however, to explore this association and to establish a causal relationship between ambient air characteristics and the development of languages.
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