ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2026
An inverse correlation between structural linguistic and human genetic diversity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Linguistic structures show uneven global distributions, but it remains unknown to what extent such distributions are driven by human population history at a global scale. Here, we track population history through population genetics and show that, adjusting for geography, phylogeny, and environment, genetic diversity (in terms of local homozygosity modeled across individuals) is inversely correlated with linguistic diversity (in terms of local entropy of structural features modeled across languages). This inverse correlation arises from the parallel impact of isolation vs. contact on both genomic and structural linguistic diversity: Isolation leads to low genetic diversity and promotes structural linguistic diversification, while contact and migration yield higher genetic diversity and promote linguistic homogenization. The extent of the correlation varies across world regions and aspects of language, but its overall global robustness highlights how hotspots of linguistic diversity can serve as a compelling example of the flexibility of human language, since they have been less affected by the increase of contact and migration that occurred over recent millennia and homogenized linguistic structures.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.