ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Genetic and linguistic comparisons reveal complex sex-biased transmission of language features.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 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
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Multiscale neural features of tonal bilingualism: linking regional differences in brain network degree centrality to neurotransmitter-gene signatures in Bai-Mandarin bilinguals.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Half a century of quantitative cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- 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
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
The history of people's movements and interactions shapes both genetic and linguistic variation. Genes and languages are transmitted separately and their distributions reflect different aspects of human history, but some demographic processes can cause them to be similarly distributed. In particular, forms of societal organization, including movements in and out of a community, may have shaped the transmission of both genes and languages. If children were more likely to learn their mother's language than their father's when their parents were from populations that spoke different languages or dialects, then language variation might show a closer association with maternally transmitted genetic markers than autosomal ones; this association could be further reinforced if children reside with predominantly maternal kin. We analyze the worldwide relationship between linguistic and genomic variation, leveraging the sex-biased transmission of X chromosomes to assess whether language has tended to be preferentially transmitted along the male or female line. In addition, we measure the effects of postmarital residence with female kin, matrilineal descent, and endogamy on the covariation of mitochondrial DNA and languages, using mtDNA because genomic data were available for very few populations with these ethnographic traits. We find that while there is little evidence for a consistent or widespread sex bias in the transmission of language, such biased transmission may have occurred locally in several parts of the world and might have been influenced by population-level ethnographic characteristics, such as female-based descent or residence patterns. Our results highlight the complex relationships between genes, language, ethnography, and geography.
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