ArticleNature communications2019
The ecological drivers of variation in global language diversity.
Article in Nature communications, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Indigenous and local knowledge inclusion in forest fauna research: A systematic review in the tropics.Ambio · 2026Pooled it
- An inverse correlation between structural linguistic and human genetic diversity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Article
- Ecological-Linguistic Overlap: The Spatial Congruence Between Giant Panda (Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- A global and interoperable dataset of linguistic distributions derived from the Atlas of the World's Languages.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Macroevolutionary analysis of polysynthesis shows that language complexity is more likely to evolve in small, isolated populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Minority identity and social structures shape diffusion dynamics of minority languages: a combined macro and micro approach.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Islands are engines of language diversity.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Global language geography and language history: challenges and opportunities.Open research Europe · 2024Article
- Can cyclone exposure explain behavioural and demographic variation among lemur species?PloS one · 2024Article
- Biocultural diversity and crop improvement.Emerging topics in life sciences · 2023Review
- Languages with more speakers tend to be harder to (machine-)learn.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Neighbours and relatives: accounting for spatial distribution when testing causal hypotheses in cultural evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- The Exceptions and the Rules in Global Musical Diversity.Journal of cognition · 2023Article
- Language endangerment: Using analytical methods from conservation biology to illuminate loss of linguistic diversity.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2023Review
- Population Histories and Genomic Diversity of South American Natives.Molecular biology and evolution · 2022Article
- Influence and Analysis of the Language and Cultural Ecological Environment in the Cognitive Process of English Writing.Journal of environmental and public health · 2022Article
- Language barriers in global bird conservation.PloS one · 2022Article
- There is little evidence that spicy food in hot countries is an adaptation to reducing infection risk.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- The geography and development of language isolates.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Language diversity is distributed unevenly over the globe. Intriguingly, patterns of language diversity resemble biodiversity patterns, leading to suggestions that similar mechanisms may underlie both linguistic and biological diversification. Here we present the first global analysis of language diversity that compares the relative importance of two key ecological mechanisms - isolation and ecological risk - after correcting for spatial autocorrelation and phylogenetic non-independence. We find significant effects of climate on language diversity, consistent with the ecological risk hypothesis that areas of high year-round productivity lead to more languages by supporting human cultural groups with smaller distributions. Climate has a much stronger effect on language diversity than landscape features, such as altitudinal range and river density, which might contribute to isolation of cultural groups. The association between biodiversity and language diversity appears to be an incidental effect of their covariation with climate, rather than a causal link between the two.
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