ArticleNational science review2019
Reconciling the father tongue and mother tongue hypotheses in Indo-European populations.
Article in National science review, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Deciphering the linguistic blueprint of DNA: context-sensitive structures, statistical patterns, and regulatory implications.Genomics & informatics · 2025Review
- Genetic and linguistic comparisons reveal complex sex-biased transmission of language features.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Inferring language dispersal patterns with velocity field estimation.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Insights into the demographic history of Asia from common ancestry and admixture in the genomic landscape of present-day Austroasiatic speakers.BMC biology · 2021Article
- Mother tongue? Muttersprache? Lingua mater? Not so fast!National science review · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
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.
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